Accepting Ebay Payments with Zen Cart: Purchase other items, and checkout

Hello and Merry Christmas Everyone!

Here is my situation:

In addition to my ZC store, I plan to be selling on ebay.

To do this effectively, I wish to be able to do this:

"After a winning bid on eBay, buyers will be redirected to your personalized online store to pay. This allows the user to view the product in his or her shopping cart, purchase other items, and checkout with just a few clicks. All eBay sales for a buyer and upsold items are combined into a single order!"

AuctionBlox offers this above service with other Os-commerce Solutions.

I am not too crazy about additional fees (AuctionBlox) or having to change carts, but this is very key in my business model.

Is there any way to integrate ebay payments with zen cart? Without or without AuctionBlox?

other threads on this issue:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7170&highlight=AuctionBlox

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=53380&highlight=ebay+payments

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29857&highlight=ebay+payments

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=46819&highlight=ebay+payments

NOT with auctionblox

and your right the prices are outrageous
you can however do this,

you can create a product ( with a new product type ) Hide prices
make it 1 penny

and have a text box drop down.

they need to enter the total of the auction in the how many box,
and put a text attribute, and they add the ebay order number

Hello Again, and thank you for your response,

I have been going in circles going from Product Type Info Page Layout options, Attributes Controller and Product in Category, trying to achieve what you suggested. I am not proficient enough (yet) in ZC to know where to make the changes :frusty:

Can you tell me where exactly to make these changes?

you can create a product ( with a new product type )

OK- Created new product (Product in Category) with new product type (DOCUMENT PRODUCT)

Hide Prices Do mean "Call for price" from new Product in Category?where else can I hide the price?

make a penny OK in new product/Product in Category? or some default elsewhere?

and have a text box drop down In Attributes Controller? if so can't find text box drop down

they need to enter the total of the auction in the how many box can't find text how many box

and put a text attribute, and they add the ebay order numberOK- found this in attributes controller (line 1 [Text])

Hide Prices is done in the file by commenting out the code to display the price,
I would replace it with text to read Enter auction total amount here

for the penny create a new product called ebay auctions,

set the price to be .01

now when they add the price from the auction it will actually register as xxx.xx products at 1 cent apiece

Yes enter the price in the how many box

OK: As far as I can understand:

"Hide Prices is done in the file by commenting out the code to display the price,
I would replace it with text to read Enter auction total amount here."

------Which/where is the file that should I comment out the code? somewhere in includes or admin>includes? what is the file name?

"for the penny create a new product called ebay auctions,

set the price to be .01"

------OK...

"now when they add the price from the auction it will actually register as xxx.xx products at 1 cent apiece

Yes enter the price in the how many box"

--------I put in price of 112.50 in the add to cart box....which I assume I will edit in the code to read enter price.....when I click on add to cart I get an Quantity Error Adjustment and the cart rounds 112.50 to 113

So then I am not really messing about with product types/attribute controller other than creating a text box for the customer to enter the ebay item description (which is not a drop down box?)

I got this working somewhat, making the product $1, and quantity units $.01, changing the product Quantity Decimals to 2, + getting rid of this error:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50612&highlight=Error+setting+fractional+quantity

I still do not know where to : "Hide Prices is done in the file by commenting out the code to display the price,
I would replace it with text to read Enter auction total amount here."

the product type is DOCUMENT PRODUCT and document_product_info is in the URL, I don't see where to change/hide price in this or related files, can you tell me where? also how did I get rid of the Units: 0.01 text under the add to cart box? is it in the same file? or an admin pref?

Should I change anything else in product types or attribute controller other than creating a text box for the customer to enter the ebay item description?

Is there a better way of doing this?

Ok, I got it.

I found the file in which to "hide the price" I was looking at english/document_product_info and not templates/tpl_document_product_info_display.php

The new 1.3.7 update corrected the quantity error bug above.

The last issue of the add to cart box, I did a drastic workaround by editing the languages/english.php and using an over ride folder.

Is there a less "site-wide" edit to change the text from "add to cart:" to "enter total here: $" ? Using the existing product type: document product? or less importantly a way to get rid of Units: 0.01 text under the add to cart box? aside from the same languages/english.php file?

Also, if there is a better way, please post.

Hi,

Would you mind posting a link to your site so we can see how it works? I would love to have something like this for my Ebay auctions.

Thanks!
michelle

Hi!

I am in the midst of a fresh install of ZC and have no site to look at currently. Check the Jpg above to see a screen shot, you might wait for more posts/ideas from others, however before making the above changes...... as it is now, you lose the words "Add to Cart" site wide and will be unable to have customers enter more than one of something, with out being confused.:beta:

Perhaps a custom Mod is in order, and one one bright sunny day a zen-cart ebay API with both carts integrated.

We can only dream about that. Doesn't Ebay charge you something like $5,000 to intergrate your cart and theirs. Thanks for the inspiration and the links though.

michelle

OK here is the simple breakdown

use a different product type for ebay payment

create a product called ebay payments,
make the cost of that product 1 cent.
now edit the tpl file ONLY for that product type to remove the text that you dont want.

add the text to put in price

Leave the add to cart, they MIGHT just do more shopping,

put in a text only attribute ( Required ) for the auction number.

voila this works for ebay yahoo and any other auction you can think of.

are you looking for something like this

http://www.camelot-hosting3.com/137/beta/index.php?main_page=document_product_info&cPath=65&products_id=180

This is rough and was done in about 5 mins

Hi Merlin!

Holy Smokes that was fast, that took me a week!

That is exactly it! How were you able to change the text in the add to cart box? (to winning amount) is that edit located in the templates/tpl_document_product_info_display.php file or elsewhere? I had to change mine in the english.php file. Is there a specific code to add text in php?

The decimal is important for odd amounts that happen on ebay due to bidding: $100.99 etc...what do you think of my making products a dollar/2 decimal places/units at .01 and how do I get rid of the units display in the add to cart box, once I change the unit from 1 - it appears a min: .01

$the_button = PRODUCTS_ORDER_QTY_TEXT . '<input type="text"

changed that to

$the_button = 'Winning amount:<br /> ( no decimal )<input type="text

I did it quick, ideally you would just create a new define for it.

the reason I said without the decimel point is that the product is 1 cent,

so 1063 is $10.63

10099 is $100.99

voila

Thanks Merlin!

I really do appreciate your help.

:cheers:

Please post if you or anyone can think of any additional improvements for accepting ebay payments.

I can't believe that only took you 5 minutes. Thanks for the example. Now I have to decide how to adjust my shipping charges.

michelle

Thanks Merlin! I just thought about adding this today and was trying to come up with ways. Yours was so simple and way better than what I was going to do. I was making it more difficult than it needed to be. :wink2:

glad to be of service

Wish I had seen this thread earlier.
Great idea Merlin! I may have to experiment with it and see how it works. :smile:

I've been using the 'Quick Order' mod for our auction payments.
I have a hidden category called 'Sold eBay Auctions' where I enter each auction item and use the eBay item number for the model number. I direct the buyers to the Quick Order page, they enter the item number of the auction they won and click Add to Cart. It puts it in the shopping cart and they can either checkout or continue shopping.

It works great EXCEPT, I have to be there when the auction ends so I can enter the winning bid amount. Luckily that works for me because I don't have a 'real life' and we never have more than two auctions end a night. :laugh:

If you only sell eBay Store items, the Quick Order works like a charm once you get the products initially set up in the hidden category because they continually relist on eBay and the item number/price never changes.

Fixed Price auctions work really good too as long as you remember to change the item number when you relist.

Hmmm...I wonder if it would be possible to combine the two methods and make a Quick Order/Enter Your Own Price fix. :eek:

Sorry to bring up this old thread, I've got some questions.

Currently I take general payments from eBay, yahoo, and bunch of other auction sites through a general payment form I made using just html, very simple nothing fancy and works well. Customer can pay using PayPal or GoogleCheckout.

However, I like the idea of having the payment processed through ZenCart and thus capture the info in the database.

I was able to do what was described above and it sort of works.
However, there are a couple of issues.

• If I make the product price $0.01, the way it looks in the cart is not too good, example:

Qty      Item name  Unit   Total
26575 x Payment     $0.01  $265.75

• If I make the product price $1 instead and use units of 0.01, it looks and works a bit better since I don't have to explain to customers not to enter a decimal point. However, this doesn't seem to work with GoogleCheckout. It seems GC doesn't support fractional quantity.

For these reasons, I would like to know if there's another way to do it, like through attributes, priced by attributes, something like adding an attribute box where customers can enter the amount and that'll be the price.
This way the quantity that shows in the cart will only be '1 x payment', which looks much better and it would work with GoogleCheckout.

I've been looking at the attributes for a couple of hours, but I haven't figured out a way I can do this.

Does anyone if this is possible or if there's some other alternative?

Thanks.