Multiple Delivery Dates

[nacotton]

I am developing a site for a menswear fashion business, to allow retailers to order online. The range includes some items that are part of the current range, but out of stock until a particular date (say, next month) as well as items that are the next season's range (all available on 25th January, say).

It would be fantastic to allow the user to place items into, say, two separate carts - one for immediate delivery and one for delivery on 25th January.

Or even more flexibly, to allow multiple carts with different delivery dates (now, two weeks' time, when next range is available) and allow user to move products up or down between carts (with the obvious proviso of not being able to move an item 'up' to a cart before that product's availability date...

Fairly complex, I know. But we can't be the only people out there with different availability dates for products...?

All help, pointers, random insults, gratefully received!

[Mike Hughes]

It sounds like a techies dream but why as a customer would I want to play around with different carts?

Whenever I buy something I want to get it as soon as it's available (that's why people buy, becausee they have a 'want/need' they want to satisfy).

The other option is to save money on shipping and have everything sent together.

What amazon does is to give customers 2 shipping options when items have different availability. 'Send Items seperately' or 'wait and send everything together'. To me that's easy to understand and covers the options pretty well.

It would be nice if actinic had an availability attribute for items that the cart and checkout could process. When this arrives I'll offer the same simple option that amazon does.

Mike

[nacotton]

Sophisticated trade buyers...

Mike,

Thanks for the quick response...

You're absolutely right that the consumer wants speed of service. But our site is for trade customers, running independent retail outlets. They want to be able to spend time looking through our range (2500+ items) at their leisure and selecting what they want for their store for the next season. About half our range is permanently there (for example, a plain black silk bow tie) and the other half (including more 'designed' items) changes with four different 'seasons'.

Meanwhile, when they sell out of something, they also want to be able to place a replenishment order now, from the current season's range, for soon-as delivery.

I think you are hinting that, if not implemented 'neatly', it will just be seriously confusing to the user - and take that point very seriously. But our application (and our pretty sophisticated trade, not consumer, buyers) does require us to offer 'forward order' or 'back order' capability like this.

Again, any genius work-arounds (at a tech or business process level!) greatly appreciated.

Perhaps I can offer half a dozen very expensive silk ties to the best assistance?!

Cheers,

Neill.

[Mike Hughes]

OK. Sorry Neil, I missed the trade/retailer reference.

To my mind this would be very hard to do well with actinic. Largely because actinic only allows customers to place new orders, whereas trade customers who are ordering in advance would ideally want to be able to pull forward and push back items within existing orders.

I can see though why you'd like the multiple carts so the customers could at least get their different orders onto the system. The only thing I can think of is to include a seperate field with each item (or order) to include a 'required by' date. It would still be a bit of a challenge to handle these on the order porcessing side though.

Mike.