Not sure how to do this...

I have a customer who has a modified 1.3.9h cart. Most of her business is done in the store front, but some customers are purchasing online. She just started using Authorize.net as her payment processor and no longer as a terminal in her store front. She needs to be able to bill customers through her website. The problem is, only a very small fraction of her inventory is online. her stock changes daily, so she doesn't keep the site updated with anything except the items that she always has in stock. (she is a flower and gift shop)

I see there are edit orders or super orders plugins, but not sure they will work for what we need. How can my customer add an order for something that isn't on the website? Can I create a product that has no price unless she manually enters the pricing? Please help!

aperfecthost:

I have a customer who has a modified 1.3.9h cart. Most of her business is done in the store front, but some customers are purchasing online. She just started using Authorize.net as her payment processor and no longer as a terminal in her store front. She needs to be able to bill customers through her website. The problem is, only a very small fraction of her inventory is online. her stock changes daily, so she doesn't keep the site updated with anything except the items that she always has in stock. (she is a flower and gift shop)

I see there are edit orders or super orders plugins, but not sure they will work for what we need. How can my customer add an order for something that isn't on the website? Can I create a product that has no price unless she manually enters the pricing? Please help!

Probably the easiest way to accomodate an unknown inventory/price is to create a product that has a text fill in attribute (used to identify the product by the individual placing the order) the details of things like could it be entered to the penny, and plus up inventory to a large enough amount that it won't go out relatively soon. If this is something she is the only one entering, then that becomes relatively easy to do. I'm not sure though about all of the address/user account aspects of going this way and using authorize.net.

aperfecthost:

I have a customer who has a modified 1.3.9h cart. Most of her business is done in the store front, but some customers are purchasing online. She just started using Authorize.net as her payment processor and no longer as a terminal in her store front. She needs to be able to bill customers through her website. The problem is, only a very small fraction of her inventory is online. her stock changes daily, so she doesn't keep the site updated with anything except the items that she always has in stock. (she is a flower and gift shop)

I see there are edit orders or super orders plugins, but not sure they will work for what we need. How can my customer add an order for something that isn't on the website? Can I create a product that has no price unless she manually enters the pricing? Please help!

Sorry in my last message I didn't speak to edit orders or super orders. Basically these two plug-ins deal with orders that have already been made. They modify how the admin side of ZC works with/displays order information, allowing the store owner/operator to well, edit an order, or do things like split an order, provide a more detailed/customized packing list or invoice. They basically do what order processing already does, but a bit more. There are a couple of plugins that allow a store admin to act as a customer, or toenter a new order, etc... But, without something customized to handle the on-the-fly purchase, product(s) would need to be entered prior to or in parallel with a purchase.

There's no way I know of (or can think of) to process an order through Zencart containing a product that isn't (at some point) in the Zencart catalog. You could create a catch-all product with a price of $.01 and she could add a quantity of, say, 3021 for a product that costs $30.21, but the whole idea seems clunky. How does she plan to get the customers' credit card info into the system ?

She will act like the customer and add an order. The problem I'm having is the actual price to the sell. I will see if what mc12345678 suggests works. I'm not exactly sure how to add that but I will try.

aperfecthost:

She will act like the customer and add an order. The problem I'm having is the actual price to the sell. I will see if what mc12345678 suggests works. I'm not exactly sure how to add that but I will try.

So, I still haven't implemented a change to correct a part of what. I don't like about this feature, but: I set a product to have a price of $1, minimum purchase price of $0.01 (although that's not required) and units of 0.01, so when I went to my cart, adding 1 identified $1, adding 0.05 made it $0.05. That way there isn't an issue with the factor of 10 or 100.

As for the "blank" attribute. Will need to use the option names editor, enter text that you want to be seen, "enter the description of the product being purchased:"

Option type text.
Then you will need to use the attribute manager and tie that attribute (option name) with the product in question. Further, you might want to make it a mandatory field so that there is always something filled in to "capture" inventory.