Is there a way to tell customer of prior purchase of an item in cart?

[DrByte]

You could consider writing custom code to trigger (via a notifier/observer) on the Shopping Cart page, which could throw up some warnings via the messageStack about things they already "own". It would need to fire on all checkout pages as well as the login-success stage and redirect them to the shopping cart for displaying those messages, so they can remove the items from their cart ... or click a link in the error message to take them to their My Account screen to look up their order history.

Writing observers is custom code. There are many examples I've posted around the forum, as well as many addons which use them so they don't need to touch any core files when providing their added functionality.

[OrcaSoul]

You could consider writing custom code to trigger (via a notifier/observer) on the Shopping Cart page, which could throw up some warnings via the messageStack about things they already "own". It would need to fire on all checkout pages as well as the login-success stage and redirect them to the shopping cart for displaying those messages, so they can remove the items from their cart ... or click a link in the error message to take them to their My Account screen to look up their order history.

Writing observers is custom code. There are many examples I've posted around the forum, as well as many addons which use them so they don't need to touch any core files when providing their added functionality.

Is there any way in the database to easily link the customer to the products they own? A quick scan doesn't show any obvious way, but the the history order page does show the products in the orders, so the info is somewhere, just a matter of tracking it down and finding the time - and boning up on MySQL...

Great...another project...just what I need.

[DrByte]

The orders table contains the customers_id, which is a match to the customers table, and if you link the orders table to orders_products on orders_id then you'll see what products they've purchased.

[OrcaSoul]

The orders table contains the customers_id, which is a match to the customers table, and if you link the orders table to orders_products on orders_id then you'll see what products they've purchased.

Thanks - I'll check it out.

I guess I'll have to dig out that book on MySQL...