selling products by weight

[damodesign]

can't work out and can't find answers in past posts with regards the possibility of selling products by weight!

I am setting up an actinic shop for our grocery shop and want to be able to sell vegetables by weight - we want the customer to be able to specify their desired quantity in weight, for example:

Organic Potatoes
Price : £0.98 /kg
Quantity : (customer enters weight) 500g

when the customer adds this to the basket, we want to have the weight displayed and the cost (in this case it would be 49p)

can this be done - and how?

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic can only handle integer quantities. So if you price your product per Kg, you can let the customer buy in quantities of 1, 2, 3, etc Kg.

Make the product name something like "Spuds (per Kg)".

You can change the Quantity prompt for "Quantity:" to "Weight in whole Kg" by making a copy of your product Layout and changing the prompt in that copy. Or you can create a new Variable and use that instead of the Quantity: one.

[wjcampbe]

The problem with this is that there is no decimal point possible in the quantity, so to sell quarter or half kilogrammes you would have to price by the gram - £0.01 per gram would be your lowest possible price (not including VAT).

Either that or price and sell in whole kilogramme multiples only.

[damodesign]

guessed by trial and error that it wasn't possible - but reading some other posts thought there might be some magic the likes of you two could muster.
thanks for the reply - might just make a series of choices based on 100g increments, and see how it goes.

[NormanRouxel]

It [is possible to buy with decimal amounts (price the product per Kg and buy e.g. 1.25Kg) but it requires a significant amount of costly customisation, both to the Product Layout and several Perl scripts.

There are plenty of prior posts regarding doing similar things to what you suggest above. Searching for selling by the metre will find some.

[MikeBooker]

OK so the original post was in March, and now it's ten to November - has anyone figured a way to do this yet? I am setting up a shop to sell veg by weight, and at least one decimal point would be grand.

I can't beleive this problem hasn't been solved before! Of course I can set up a new variable, but then it has to be the one used to calculate the price Hmm!

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic hasn't changed since March so the problems and workarounds stay the same.

Either price your product per 100gm and sell in multiples of that.

Or bespoke customisation to overide the product price or quantity with a calculated one.

[MikeBooker]

Norman, thanks for the response
Yes, I understand that Actinic hasn't changed, I was just hoping someone had figured out a method of doing it. 100g quantities isn't really viable, if say you are selling potatoes loose and someone want 2.5Kg.

I am prepared to customise Actinic. I can add a new variable in, but not sure where to look for how that calculates the price. I've been searching threads and trawing through the Perl scripts, but as yet havent found out where the customisations need to be done. e.g. the Quantity * Price = Cost for an item, and why it's an integer how I might change that.

Naively, I assume this has been made to work before, hence the post.

[NormanRouxel]

I've made this work several times. However each one required significant time to implement. See for exmple http://www.fastframes.co.uk/acatalog...__a_Width.html where we're calcuating a complex product price to the penny.

If I recall correctly, 4 different Perl scripts need customising for this to work:

ShoppingCart.pl (a few places - to accept the decimal quantity)
Cart.pm (2 places - to store the overridden quantity)
ActinicOrder.pm (many places - to calculate and use the overridden price)
OrderScript.pl (2 places - to get correct data onto the Reports and customer email).

[MikeBooker]

I think you have convinced me it isn't easy If you have had to go through all that, then there no chance for the humble hack like me.

Actinic: Any chance of putting this on the wish list?

[NormanRouxel]

You could always use a zero price product "Tatties" with a mandatory component "Selection", then an Attribute "Weight in Kg" with Choices for each likely weight, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.25, etc.

Now use Permutations and Fill List to price each one, and that's as close as you'll get with V8.