Does zen fit custom products with variable attributes?

[CartCrazy]

Hi, I need a shopping cart software. Frankly, we do have custom built shopping cart that works perfectly but then it is getting too expensive for us to build a coupon software in-house to go with it. When we started looking for coupon software online, we realized that every coupon and gift card software out there comes integrated with shopping cart software. So, we need to either build a coupon software in hosue or buy a new shopping cart software entirely. Building coupon software in house is getting difficult. So that wont work...now we are looking for shopping cart software!!

My products are not standard products. I sell custom books and each book has different properties: A) variable number of pages B) different types of cover

If I use a traditional software for my shopping cart, it will not work for me because they only work with products that have fixed characteristics. If every product in my store is different from the other, what do we do? We tried to break one product down to three products - a basic book , number of pages, type of cover. So in a shopping cart, when a user pruchases a custom made book with 40 pages and hard cover, then ONE photo book will show up as - One basic book + 40 of a product called pages + 1 of a product called hard cover. However, the problem is this: a user can edit the products in a shopping cart. So if he wants a book with 40 pages in it, and in his shopping cart, he sees a book as one product and 40 of another product called pages, he can edit or delete the pages out. So...that is going to complicate and confuse everything.

So help me...do you have any suggestions for my problem?

[kobra]

I think that you can use attributes for this as in

Product = book
attribute1 = type of cover
attribute2 = #pages - there is an attribute class that is price per letter that you can probably alter to say pages

[CartCrazy]

Okay, I will give you an example and tell me if Zen will work...

1. You make a book on our website using our software. When you upload the book to our server, the URL will give me the product ID of the book you are uploading. The product id will contain the type of book ( hard cover, soft cover). It will also give me the number of pages. - 20 pages, 30 pages etc.

2. I need to give you the price of the book based on those two bits of information the software gives me.

3. If all I have is a product ID and the number of pages, can ZEN work for me?

How will I have to create a product Catalog?

Currently in my custom product catalog, I have 3 products :

Product ID/ Title/ Cost/ cost of each additional pages/
100/ hardcover book/ $2/ 0.20
121/softcoverbook/$1/ 0.20
133/Wirebound book/$3/ 0.20

Now, how will zen work for me with this product catalog?

Please please please help me...i beg you....

[kobra]

Best if you install Zen Cart and the demo products as most of this is represented albeit in pieces.

This will be one product with one or more attributes as I explained earlier
The order will have these selected attributes listed.

This will probably look different than what you currently have but will have the required information of the product/options selected

[CartCrazy]

Cobra,

You are the best....!!! I will try to install the Zen demo and see if it works for me.

But a lot of codes were discouraging me saying that my situation is different from many and so no OTS software will work..

I guess the best thing to do is try. But can you tell me if you understood what my problem is?

Regards,
Prathibha

[kobra]

But can you tell me if you understood what my problem is?

More than one way to skin a cat....

I am not positive if I fully comprehend your product but here are 2 senarios

First: product is Book and priced by attributes

Attribute1 - type(as radio buttons or a drop down)
Select One(default for display only)
hardcover book $2
softcoverbook $1
Wirebound book $3

Attribute2 - pages(using a altered price by letter function)
# of pages entry

SECOND: product will be pages with a price for each

So the quanntity to add to cart is the # of pages desired

Options for this are

Attribute1 - type(as radio buttons or a drop down)
Select One(default for display only)
hardcover book $2
softcoverbook $1
Wirebound book $3


So in either the book is ordered and the cover type is selected and it's upcharge is added to the total
In the first the price by letter adds the charge per page
In the second the customer is instructed to enter the # of pages

Actually not positive the second is configurable but it is worth trying

[CartCrazy]

Okay, I think you got it a little bit wrong here. The big challenge is that the customer does not enter the 'desired' number of pages.

Lets say you are a person with a digital camera who wants to gift your mom an album filled with family photos.

You check online for a vendor who cam print your photos into an album directly.

You find our company that specializes in photo - books.

You download our software that helps you build a book.

You install our free software onto your desk top and input your photos.

You play with the software for a few seconds and voila, you have a beautiful soft copy of a book with all your family photos.

Lastly, you select the button that says ' Send to MyPicTales' for getting your soft copy printed into a real book.

Then your file gets uploaded to me and then a URL opens automatically in your desktop browser asking you to login to finish the payment process.

This URL contains the address to our shopping cart.

You log in, and we use the information in your URL ( productID and no of pages) to capture what type of album you are making and how many pages your album consists of.

Our code immidiately goes to our product catalog, looks up against the product ID from the URL and says ' AAh Cobra is making a Hard Cover photo book, which has 28 pages'. There fore, I will charge him $20 for the hard cover book and $4 for the no of pages and $10 for the custom cover option.

The key factor that complicates my situation is this: The software is the only place where you select what type of book you want to build. In the software, there is a huge list of options:
1. Hard cover 8.5 X 11
2. Hard cover 5 X 7
3. softcover 8.5 X 11
4. hard cover with custom cover 8.5 X 11
5. had cover with custom cover 5 X 7
,,,,,,,

So you pick hard cover 8.5 X 11 with custom cover option, and then proceed with building a book.....after adding your pictures and building your book, you see that your book took 28 pages to make your design.

There is no radio button here. and at this point, the user does not have to pick the no of pages or custom cover option...in our product catalog, we already have a product ID for each option except for number of pages.

Now tell me, how can I configure ZEN to go to my product catalog and pick up the information to calculate the price of the product ? All I can provide Zen is number of pages and the product ID from a URL .

Regards,
Prathibha

[kobra]

That is different alright...

Doing a capture of these details and a DB lookup/cpmpare to match this up with a product is not at all a default function of Zen Cart and this part would require a goo bit of custom php/mysql coding

The compliment of products by model # is not an issue it is the automation I referenced above that is custom in this case..and again not at all standard,

You might post in the commercial help wanted section of this site and see what type of quotes you get

I would put together a consise layout of what you have and what is generated from it and the desired action that needs coding first

[CartCrazy]

Okay.....so tell me, in your opinion, do you know that there is no software out there that is JUST COUPON software?

Regards,
Prathibha