Is it possible to share a saved shopping cart?

[redbiker]

I'd like to find a way of a member of our sales team adding a list of products to the shopping cart, saving the cart then ideally emailing an html link to a customer who can then follow that link to fill their shopping cart with the same items before reviewing, changing items if required and then placing the order.

Is this possible in Actinic (V8) or is there a work around I could use?

Presumably if someone saves shopping cart information in Actinic it's stored in the browser's cookies?? Is there any way to access that information easily?

[leehack]

I'd give up on that road of attack, instead get your staff member to create a page (section) in actinic, duplicate the required products into it, have single add to cart setup, upload the page and tell customer to go to that page and click add to cart.

Add products via prod references might be a possibility too, give them an easy to add products form, where they just add the references you give them.

That's my ideas dried up anyway.

Ooh last one, install live chat and guide them.

[redbiker]

Thanks Lee. We've done the creating pages with duplicate products thing. Works OK when there are only a few sales people and they are Actinic savvy - only problem is we've got 5 or 6 sales staff who aren't that clued up with Actinic (although of course know their products very well) and one Actinic installation. So I need something I can easily expand to a large number of sales staff without them all trying to access Actinic at the same time

Your second idea sounds like it might be a go-er though. You mean send the customer a list of links to the products? Or have you got something a bit smarter in mind??

[Mike Hughes]

You could write an application in PHP to do something like this.

The way I see it working is

1. The sales guy adds the items to the cart cart on the website.

2. the sales guy then accesses PHP script A that shows him the carts available (as there may be more than one doing this at a time) and creates a link for him to email to the customer with a unique reference code for that cart.

3. The customer gets two links in the email to click in order.

- The first uses a cgi-bin link to create the actinic cookie and session file.
- the second goes to PHP script B which will look at his IP address, find his session file and then rename the sales guys session file to that of the customer using the reference code to identify the right one.

All done.

There's a bit of PHP development to be done, but there doesn't seem to be anything too horrendous.

Mike

[leehack]

There's an addon available (drillpine is one of them I believe), where products can be added via their product reference number only, so you would give me 'ABC123', i'd put that into a quick buy form, which just asks for the reference number and has an add to cart button. I repeat the process for all references you give me and I have not had to leave the page or navigate to do it. That builds my cart with all the products easily then.

[leehack]

PS - why not upgrade to V9 and use the MOTO form, where you ring the customer up and process it for them?

[redbiker]

Better solution!

Create a login account for the salesperson. Salesperson fills up the shopping cart with all items in the order, goes to checkout, saves cart.

Salesperson now sends login details to customer who logs in, goes to view cart, then hits "retrieve" - all items appear in the shopping cart.

Any idea how long they persist in there for (or is it until someone clears the cart)??

[leehack]

I'd be very surprised if that works, i'd expect details are stored locally.

[Rich Brady]

Can I ask why your customer wont just order online themselves? I've been following the thread, intrigued by the possible solutions and interested to know what the situation is.

[redbiker]

Tried it on my machine on different browsers, then logged in to another 2 machines at remote locations. Seems to work on them too.

We sell bikes. I'm looking at an efficient way of putting orders onto the system for custom machines where the customer gets to choose every single component. I've used products with components/attributes/choices in the past but because of the rate that new components come in and out of stock finding it very difficult to stay on top of maintaining these "custom build" bike pages.

We sell maybe 20 different frames and hundreds of different components so pages need to be set-up so that only compatible components can ever be picked together. We've tried this and it ends up with the site being very complicated and confusing for the customer. This wouldn't be a problem if all of our customers were experts in our products (and bikes in general) and knew exactly what they wanted. Often they don't so there needs to be some guidance from a knowledgeable salesperson.

Easier method - customer contacts us. We put him in touch with someone who knows the sort of products he/she is interested in inside out. Then there's a consultancy process between the salesman and customer. Salesman and customer come to an agreed spec for the bike. Salesman organises the shopping cart for the customer and sends them the already full cart.

We might do 10% of our business (by volume of sales) this way, but customers who order custom specification bikes are tending to be buying more specialist and expensive stuff. They're paying for a premium product and so there needs to be an easy way for them to access the knowledge of our salespeople and get the added value benefit of that and a guaranteed way of them getting exactly the specification that's been discussed with the salesperson. We've tried it using remote desktop logins for the customer too. That works pretty well but that means at the point of ordering the salesperson and customer need to be online (and normally on the phone) at the same time. That's pretty restrictive as often they won't be in the same country.

We'll have an experiment with it and see if it works anyhow.

[TraceyHand]

Tried it on my machine on different browsers, then logged in to another 2 machines at remote locations. Seems to work on them too.

that's not the same as trying on 2 different machines though.
I'd be surprised if this works in practise

[redbiker]

Forgot to say - thanks for all your input though. much appreciated.

[Rich Brady]

Easier method - customer contacts us. We put him in touch with someone who knows the sort of products he/she is interested in inside out. Then there's a consultancy process between the salesman and customer. Salesman and customer come to an agreed spec for the bike. Salesman organises the shopping cart for the customer and sends them the already full cart.

With all due respect if the customer and your representative have gone to all this trouble why can't payment be arranged then, instead of having to wait for your staff to put a shopping basket together.

MOTO is the way forward IMHO

[RuralWeb]

I did the exact same thing when I bought my Hewitt bike last year - I phoned up, discussed the spec and gave Paul my card details - no need for doing anything online IMO.

Nice bikes you sell though - if I were a road race man then I would be having one!!!

[redbiker]

We prefer not to take card/delivery details over the phone. From experience getting the customer to input their own details into the system is more accurate (especially when taking foreign orders where us UK folk might not always understand the layout of foreign postal addresses). Even the smallest error in the input of an address nearly always results in the card payment ending up in fraud review. Also doing it this way keeps everything nice and secure.

It does work. Had a first order using this system this morning. A lovely fixed wheel time trial bike.

Again, thanks for taking an interest. You're a helpful bunch.