Minimum Quantify from Category

[greg_beyer]

Hello,

Can someone suggest a way to handle an issue we have with our ordering. We sell, among other products, perishables that must go in an insulated box, with gel packs and/or dry ice.

Shipping is done via dimensional weight.

We have customers who order one unit out of a category of perishables. If that's all they order, we have to fill the remainder of the box with packs, and packing paper, shipping them mostly air and packs. They would be far better off ordering two more units, so that I box is densely packed, helping to keep it cold, and requiring less packs/dry ice. We also loose on shipping when they order so little product.

Is there a way, programatically, either with what is built in to Z-C or with a plugin, to suggest (not force) the customer to add more units, when their shopping cart has too few items. This isn't a minimum quantity of a product issue, since they can select one of product A, one of product B and one of product C, meeting the best minimum number of items. Its a minimum quantity from a whole category issue.

Thanks for any insights.

Greg

[swguy]

My suggestion would be to encourage them to add more but charge a fee if they don't.

- For the fee, you could adapt the low order fee making the required changes.
- For the check (on the shopping cart and checkout shipping pages), call $_SESSION['cart']->get_products() and iterate through the returned array, checking for too few items per category.