AgoraCart Free User Forums

Ok, I need some help figuring this out.

My customer wants his own staff to be able to take orders via phone for items that are not yet in his Agora cart DB. (This company has so many parts with so many variables, not to mention selling goods that they buy from other companies that he will never have them all in the DB) He just wants fields where anything can be entered, and by that I mean, if there is a part # field, the employee can enter any PN etc.

He wants these fields:

Part #
Price
Weight
Several fields for misc options

Employee fills all these fields in manually, chooses quantities, hits add to cart, hits checkout, enters the customers info including CC # and submits the order.

Can this be done practically? What are my options to do this.

Thanks,
David

Greetings David!

I'm sure that this is possible. I'm not a perl coder so I can't exactly give you code examples and such but here would be the basic algorithm.

1. Fill in your custom fields into each of the user field slots of the Agora database.
   
2. Have a field that tracks if the auction is publicly available yet.
   
3. On generation of the auction, have a script check to see the item is publicly available. If so--show it, if not--skip it.
   
4. The customer service representative could use a differing ppinc that wouldn't skip any items and he could then order the items for the customer.

...the theory sounds good to me.


_________________
Kurt Reonis
dpe@mindless.com

From what I can tell, I can spend the time and create an extensive options file where:

I can use Carols options file example for a text imput box for part #, descriptions, options etc.

For price I will just have to have several drop down menus. One for dollars, one for tens, one for hundreds, one for thousands and one for cents so that any price can be entered and sucessfully calculate.

I can't have a static weight in the Product DB because of the wide range of items and weight, so the stumper is how the employee can enter a shipping weight and have it be calculated.

Here is an example:
http://www.srg-inc.net/inhousetest.html

Anyones help would be most graciously accepted. I have also just signed up to be a lifetime PRO member.

Thanks,
David


_________________

If this is going to be used for orders generated via phone I would create the customer a 2nd store that only his employees can access. You can still have one for customers to access but in a different directory.

Inside the new store for the phone orders you can create categories that cover the different areas of the catalog:

Hoses
Brakes
Clamps
Etc.

Then create one item within each one that has a basic description that covers everything in that category, no weight, no price, no nothing. Create an option file with the following code and associate with each item:



Now the person at the business taking orders can go to this item, add in the actual product name in the first box and then in the second box add the product number from the catalog [NO SPACES | VERTICAL PIPE] price formatted without the $ and using a . if necessary[NO SPACES | VERTICAL PIPE] weight or cost to ship depending on your store setup.

They can select the QTY and hit add to cart.

Give it a try and LMK what you come up with.


_________________
Carol aka SouperMom
http://www.soupermom.com

SouperCarol wrote:

If this is going to be used for orders generated via phone I would create the customer a 2nd store that only his employees can access. You can still have one for customers to access but in a different directory.

Inside the new store for the phone orders you can create categories that cover the different areas of the catalog:

Hoses
Brakes
Clamps
Etc.

Then create one item within each one that has a basic description that covers everything in that category, no weight, no price, no nothing. Create an option file with the following code and associate with each item:

Code:

Enter Product Name
<INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="option|001|%%PRODUCT_ID%%" value="" SIZE=20><BR>
Enter Product # | Price | Weight
<INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="option|002|%%PRODUCT_ID%%" value="||" SIZE=20><BR>

Now the person at the business taking orders can go to this item, add in the actual product name in the first box and then in the second box add the product number from the catalog [NO SPACES | VERTICAL PIPE] price formatted without the $ and using a . if necessary[NO SPACES | VERTICAL PIPE] weight or cost to ship depending on your store setup.

They can select the QTY and hit add to cart.

Give it a try and LMK what you come up with.

This has been considered but my customers catalog is extremely large. most of the products they offer have as many as 30 different variables. This means 50,000 items, each with a variable.html page with up to 30 different variables each. I hope you can see where this is a near impossible feat to accomplish.

Even if we did take your idea of entering the basic category, the true heart of their busniess is supplying custom products. They only want to offer select items online and then take all of the complex, custom orders by phone. This is why they wanted to have a way for in house employees to process the orders and be paid throught the CC gateway.

Again, we will consider it but we were really looking for a more simple solution as I tried to outline in my original post.

Thanks,
David

Ok, didn't realize it was that many things. But still...you can just add options to enter the important stuff and then modify the way the cart contents page looks. Just add one catagory and one dummy item.


_________________
Carol aka SouperMom
http://www.soupermom.com