Psuedo products - sell stuff that is not in the catalog ?

[rookers]

Hi Boffins - is this possible? If I had a listing for a "thing" that was not in the catalog, find a way to somehow add it to the cart and checkout. eg create some sort of link that had parameters that had a short desc, price, weight, that could then be paid for and downloaded as a sale.

Its a bit like how links to Ebay work- you cane sell something on ebay and suck it into sellerdeck even though the ebay product is not listed in the sellerdeck catalog.

Why? Because I want to list 100s of thousand of spare parts but it is simply not practical to have them all set up in the database. But I could do something with csv files stored on the server.

What do you think ? It must be possible.

[NormanRouxel]

From the SellerDeck point of view you will need to be able to pass the part name and its price to the Cart and Checkout.

You could have a single "Spare Part" product with an Other Info field named Part Name and a custom entry box where the customer enters the part number.

A custom "Search for it" button would trigger code that interrogates your database and returns the product name, description, quantity available and price via AJAX. Or a "Sorry not found" response.

If found, the short description would go into the Other Info field so you'd know what was being ordered.

Tricky bit would be the price:-.

You could set the dummy product to be £1 and set the Quantity field to create multiples of that but it may be confusing for the customer to see e.g. Qty 50 for a £50 item in the Cart. And very confusing if they try to order more than one of the same part. I have an add-on Basic Price Override that lets you pass a calculated price for a specific product that would overcome that.

Another way to fix the price would be to have a set of dummy hidden products priced from the minimum spare part price to the maximum (hopefully in £1 increments). They'd have product ID's like Spare001 ... Spare999. The selected item price (£1 ... £999) would be used as the Product ID to put that product in the Cart with a normal Quantity.

[NormanRouxel]

The above post is where the customer searches for a single part. If you'd rather have a page (or set of pages) with a long list of parts that could be done too.

You could create a Fragment with 2 custom properties PartMin and PartMax defining the lower and upper spare part indexes to put on that page. A special Layout would be used that contains PHP code that runs on your SellerDeck desktop PC and creates a line for each of the spare parts, again with a hidden Other Info field containing the part name. So the customer sees a finite list of parts with the fragment description introducing them.

The server based search idea in my earlier post could be extended to return a list of parts, each with its own quantity and "Buy" button.

[rookers]

Hi interesting ideas, thanks for that. Is there no way of externally creating .cat files or whatever is necessary to make a product buyable with its own product reference, rather than using a generic one for all order lines? We use the the product reference BARCODE on the invoice - so using one single SPARE PART product ref would mean we would not have that.

[NormanRouxel]

Creating a .cat file would be a very difficult task (a significant amount of the functionality of SellerDeck would need to be reverse engineered) and probably pointless as a 100,000 item .cat file would be many megabytes in size and would probably crash your server when its Perl tried to load it. Splitting it into multiple files would reduce the risk but increase the complexity. This is somewhat at odds with your initial requirement of not overloading SellerDeck.

Far easier would be to just add the barcode data to the Other Info field and make a few line changes to OrderScript.pl to strip out that data from the Other Info text and move it to the barcode field.

I tinkered with this last night to see if it was feasible. Made a fully functional page with 10 dummy products £1 to £10 and some generated spare parts with unique names, prices and part numbers. Added in the barcode capability this morning.
See http://www.drillpine.biz/v18-webppro...are-Parts.html
Some small tweaks could be made to ActinicOrder.pm to remove the spare part number from the Other Info field and replace the dummy product reference with it for a cleaner looking Cart.

[NormanRouxel]

Added the ActinicOrder.pm tweak so the Cart is now cleaner. Didn't bother with the bounce page.