Significant changes

[GTrotter]

All

I am looking to make some substantial changes to my online store but wanted to seek some advice before I get started. I sell wedding stationery online. At the moment the site (http://www.specialdayinvitations.co.uk) is configured so that different styles of design are put into categories. These categories each contain a variety of designs. Each design contains various products ranging from invitations to placecards. The pricing is complicated and so needs to be handled by attributes, which is not ideal. At the moment people need to go into each product, set the attributes and add it to the cart before knowing the total price. I think this is a bit cumbersome. What I would like is for

1.) Users to know the approximate total price of their entire order from the products_listing page. I was thinking this should allow the user to alter the quantity and show a total at the top. Once the user has selected a quantity of each type of product in that category they can add the whole lot to the shopping cart.

2.) I would like to be able to alter the products attributes etc from the shopping_cart page (probably most easily by adding a link that utilises the product_info page in some way). This would allow users to specify all their wording etc and any other attributes such as ink colour (which may alter the final price) upon checkout.

The key thing I am trying to do is make it easier to
1.) understand what a complete order might cost
2.) make it quicker and easier to get to the stage of having goods in the shopping cart

Does anyone know of any useful threads that cover this sort of thing? Additionally I am getting a bit confused about how I might manipulate the system so that I can add multiple entries to the cart (i.e. from the product_listing page). Exactly how do I achieve this? Can anyone see any problems (apart from the fact that it changes the system quite substantially) arising from my intended change?

Thanks

Gary

[Kim]

Haven't used it yet - but there is a Javascript Price updater around that calculates the prices as the attribs are changed.

[kappaluppa]

Do you have a link to this updater?
Thanks.

[mapleleafbakery]

Hi GTrotter,

I like what you have done with + and - prices. Did you have that link to the javascript price updater. I would love to have the same thing on my site.

Thanks