Flash Product "Chooser"

[aura-digital]

Hi There,

I have a request from a customer who would like us to create a flash "product chooser/customizer" for their website.

The general outline of it is, they want to sell a range of clothing which has lots of different options eg. colour, collar style, no of pockets, chest size, arm length, waist size, collar size etc.

The customer can specify a custom size for all of the different dimensions of the product as well as specify a combination of different style elements.

all these different options need to be entered/chosen by the customer in the "applet". Dependent on the choices made by the customer, the flash "applet" displays a preview of the "custom" product chosen by the user, and when they are happy, the customized product is then added to the cart.

Any Ideas on how I might be able to integrate this product preview/customisation "applet" into the actinic shopping cart/ordering process??

Many thanks in advance

James

[Mike Hughes]

If the price doesn't change then why not just submit the data from the flash customiser under the 'other info' prompt.

Mike

[aura-digital]

Prices

Hi Mike,

many thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately the different permutations of style have implications on the price.

I've been doing some research on this and below is as far as my thinking has got;

1.) Create the Flash Movie with all the user prompts & product permutations/choices etc, read from an external file of some description.

2.) at the end of the Process/Movie, Add the product to the cart using the (Adding to cart from anywhere on the internet) trick from the advanced user guide using the additional fields for the custom data.

3.) The Product could be just 1 product called "custom shirt" in actinic, with a set of additional info fields which would recieve the style , size and colour choices from the flash movie.

The pricing is the stumbling block at present. . .

I suppose I could create a full set of products, for all of the different permutations that have an impact on the price, and then just use the additional fields for the sizing info. and any other choices that don't change the price. This could get a bit unmanagable in the future, if the customer was wishing to change the options/pricing on a regular basis.

thanks

James.

[Mike Hughes]

There are some tricks you can play with components and quantities to create a variable price (search for 'donations' if you want to see them). They aren't that clean though and if you want to make a good job of it, or at least find out what's possible, then Norman Rouxel at Drillpine http://www.drillpine.biz/ is someone you should be talking to.

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

If you feel that the job is best done in Flash and that you can calculate the price in Flash then it may be possible. You'd need to be able to pass the calculated price and a list of the customer choices to some JavaScript variables which can then be passed to some custom Cart code that uses the calculated price instead of the Actinic product one.

I can help with the overriding of the Actinic price and display of the choices in the Cart, Downloaded Order and Customer Email. I don't use Flash so it would be up to someone else to do that bit and store the results.

[aura-digital]

Norman, many thanks for the reply.

If you could help on instructing us how we override the price & choices in the cart etc. that would be brilliant.

We're reasonably competent with flash actionscript and can use the callJavascript function to set javascript variables in the page.

once again

many thanks

James

[NormanRouxel]

Best contact me by email as it's a non-trivial exercise and may need paid for work to be done.