Will Zen Cart do this?

Hi,

We're looking to develop a site selling "standard" products as well as custom printed products. I'm looking for a shopping cart that can do the following things either as standard or with extra modules...

1. The ability to calculate the final price of a product based on the options selected ie width, height, backing material, quantity, lamination etc. This would probably have to be done with some kind of formula like width x height x price per meter, so would require some way of storing meterage prices as well as standard product prices. (Essential)

2. Preferably to be able to calculate this and update the total on the fly so the customer can see the price update as they select the options. (Desirable)

3. To be able to take this final spec and price and produce a quotation that the customer can choose to have emailed to them if they don't want to purchase there and then and that could also be saved to the system and/or emailed to us. (Desirable)

4. To allow customers to enter custom sizes when selecting a product (ie 1273mm x 549mm). Obviously this won't be possible with drop down menus so text input fields I assume are the only way to do this. (Essential)

5. A mechanism for customers to upload their own artwork to the system when/after making a purchase. (Almost Essential)

Will Zen Cart do this or should I be looking elsewhere?

Thanks.

While not all of this is available internally, the add-on structure is such that you should be able to find someone to do what you're looking for for a reasonable price, if not free. The product attribute functions allow for selecting attributes from a list, but I don't believe you could do complex math calculations with the built-in options. That being said, it sounds like you would just need some modifications to the available attribute functions and a way for customers to upload artwork, though you could just give them an Email address as well. As for receiving quotes, the customer can be given an option to either order now to save the item to their wish list. There is also a Tell a Friend modification that could be used or modified to Email a price quote. Hope this helps. ZC offers a lot of possibilites and there is often several solutions to the challenges you are trying to meet. Given the basic infrastructure and countless modules that are free, I'd say it's worth a look for your business.

5. There is a file upload attribute type, so the customer can browse and upload their artwork when placing the order.

The multiplied attribute prices are a form of "dependent attributes", which can have so many possible variants that it is apparently not practical to build a generic functionality in the cart system (or someone would have done it long ago). This means that you are not likely to find any pre-built cart software with the function you need; you can have it coded for your requirements by rent-a-coder or the Commercial Help Wanted forum here.

gjh42:

The multiplied attribute prices are a form of "dependent attributes", which can have so many possible variants that it is apparently not practical to build a generic functionality in the cart system (or someone would have done it long ago). This means that you are not likely to find any pre-built cart software with the function you need; you can have it coded for your requirements by rent-a-coder or the Commercial Help Wanted forum here.

I'm not sure dependant attributes are all that impractical to do. Aren't the devs doing dependant attributes in v2 as we speak? (Using jQuery, I think.) I thought it was on the roadmap.

Rob

Any one version of dependent attributes is quite doable. The problem as I understand it is that there are so many ways to want to use them, some mutually exclusive, that a universal system would be hugely complex. I would love to know that it is coming up, but my recollection was that v2.0 attributes are not going that far.

I saw some forum discussion for a cart under development where the initial dev's proposal/concept was quickly overwhelmed by people wanting something just a bit different in several directions.

Thanks for the replies.

I have a reasonable knowledge of PHP and I'm a pretty technical person so as long as the modifications are not too heavy I'm hoping to do them myself.

Another way I've tried to explain what we're looking for is as follows...

"We have a meterage price for the print itself, along with meterage prices for backing materials, laminates and various finishes. What we want to do is have the user enter the width and the height they require in input fields and have the cart update to show the "print only" price for the size they've selected, without reloading the page.

Then if the user selected a backing material the system would work out the additional cost based on the dimensions they entered previously and the meterage cost of the backing material that's stored in the system, then update the cart display accordingly. Then the same with lamination and other options, so the customer is building up the spec of the item bit by bit and seeing the changes they're making reflected in the cart's price display."

Is this going to be hard to achieve in Zen Cart? I realise that it's very probably possible (but so is just about everything else with enough work) but is it going to be more hassle than going another route? Am I going to be forcing it to do something it's not really suited to?

For instance, I see the way the price info is stored being a bit of an issue... How would the meterage prices be stored? Would each be a separate product which then are combined to create a final product? Or would I create one product which has all the meterage prices as attributes and then combine them to create the final price?

I know Joomla / Virtuemart has a module called Fabrik which builds these types of applications. Don't really want to use Virtuemart but I'm wondering if it's going to make my life a bit easier.

Thanks.