Drop down list

[chrisholgate]

I currently have the site www.refreshcartridges.co.uk hosted using Mals E-commerce however I have somewhat outgrown it and looking for another solution. I have the free 30 day actinic trial and it looks perfect but I seem unable to create the drop down lists to select the printer type as seen on the site above (check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/canon.html to see what I mean). I don't really want to have to list every printer we supply as a text value like every other printer cartridge site that uses Actinic does.

Is this possible at all?

Kind regards

[cdicken]

You can do this with Actinic Business's 'Searchable Properties' feature. This feature allows you to include custom fields to search on for your products.

I'm guessing that one cartridge is compatible with multiple printers, so this is what you need to do.

Create your cartridge products in Actinic. Then right-click on your cartridges and select 'New Attribute'. Call it 'Compatible Printers'. Then right-click on the attribute and select 'New Choice'. Ensure you create one choice for each printer the cartridge is compatible with. Repeat this process for each cartridge you sell.

Then go to 'View | Search Settings | Searchable Properties' and add a new row to the grid. Select 'Compatible Printers' from the drop-down list and then in the label field type 'Select Your Printer Here'.

This will create the drop-downs on the search page online, that will take customers to a list of compatible cartridges.

The only slight drawback is that you then get a list of choices appearing online for 'Compatible Printers' for each cartridge.

To get around this, you need to edit the product layout template. Go to 'Design | Options | Layouts' and click 'Edit' next to the 'Product Layout' field. Find

NETQUOTEVAR:ADDTOCARTBUTTON

and replace it with

<!--NETQUOTEVAR:VARIANTS-->NETQUOTEVAR:VARIANTADDTOCARTBUTTON