Multiple shopping carts

[Art Zeugen]

Hi - we have a problematic ecommerce development which we are trying to workaround and we wondered if anyone had any good advice please. We have an established offline catalogue in MS Access which we need to turn into an ecommerce website. We have used Actinic on a previous project a few years back, which was excellent, the problem is that we have a new supplier whose products can only be sold in certain countries with different carraige terms (the main catalogue is Royal Mail rates, the new one is with postage already included in the price).

So we would create a html front end where customers could chose to either order from the main catalogue or from the minority one - products can not be mixed on each order. As far as we can tell, Actinic would be superb for creating the main site, but as the licensing is per-cart, would we need 2 copies of Business ? This is one business [sic] just two catalogues - we are still in startup, and whilst the minority catalogue is a must-do, the 30 odd products are low sales, low margin and unlikely to make much for a fair while yet. I have looked at a demo of Developer + order manager but from what I can see, this is only economic if you have 5 or more sites.

Does anyone have any opinion on where we should go from here ? Is there an Actinic workaround to run 2 carts from one copy of software ?

Alternatively, if we did bite the bullet, is it possible to run 2 copies of Business or 2 copies of Order Manager from a single PC ?

Cheers,

Art Zeugen

[Toby B]

Hi Art,

Does anyone have any opinion on where we should go from here ? Is there an Actinic workaround to run 2 carts from one copy of software ?

Alternatively, if we did bite the bullet, is it possible to run 2 copies of Business or 2 copies of Order Manager from a single PC ?

There is no workaround to have two shopping carts. You will need to purchase another licence key for Business and OM. You can have the two sites running under the same software installation.

What I’m thinking is maybe we can get around this by using weight for shipping. You could set the weight of products to be unusually high so for the countries in question, it exceeds the shipping tables and will not process the order. It's defiantly worth investigating.

Let me know if you need any help.

[Art Zeugen]

Multiple shopping carts [cont]

Thanks for your reply, much appreciated - I'll look into your suggestion further. I've encountered a couple of areas on previous projects which have involved setting odd weights - this does the job, but is a bit of a kludge, particularly if you need to use the weights as... weights.

Perhaps in a future version the powers that be might consider some kind of optional conditional field whereby fields could be included if certain criteria in other fields (products bought or whatever) were set. These days with global shipping and all that there must be a fair few sites where the reseller only has the right to sell in country X, or where a certain product isn't saleable in certain countries.

Thanks again,

Art