Product options?

[Terofal]

Hello,

I am a new user to Prestacart, having had some experience with other carts before. Prestacart's "lingo" might be different than what I am used to, since I cannot find information on how to add product options that will result in increased or decreased cost to the customer.

For instance, I have a line of products that can be emailed OR printed and delivered by mail. I would like to offer the electronic copy for free, and for the printed and/or bound materials an extra charge. Ideally, when the customer adds a product to the cart, they can choose one of these two options, and if they obtain several products, they can choose electronic copy with one, and printed/bound copy with the other. How can I do this with Prestacart? It seems like a straightforward issue, but I'm just not seeing what I'm looking for.

Thanks so much! BTW, I love Prestacart and am spreading the word about it. Hats off to you guys! :-)

-Jake

[rocky]

I think you can do this using attributes. For example, go to Catalog > Attributes and groups, create an attribute group called "Format" with attributes "Download" and "Printed". Go back to Catalog and create a new product with a price of 0. Tick "Is this a downloadable product?", then upload the downloadable file for that product and enter the number of days after ordering that the product can be downloaded. Then go to the "3. Combinations" tab, then click the Product Combinations Generator, select "Download" and "Printed" in the list, then click Add. Set the price impact for the Download attribute to 0 and for the Printed attribute to whatever you want to charge for the printed copy, then click Generate and "Back to product".

This will allow the customer to choose whether they want to download a product for free or buy a printed copy before they add a product to the cart. The only problem is that they will still be able to download the product if they choose "Printed", but since your product is free to download, this shouldn't be a product. If this is going to be a problem, you can use attachments instead of attributes. Instead of doing the steps in the previous paragraph, go to Catalog > Attachments and add all the files there, then create a product with the printed price, then go to the "7. Attachments" tab and choose the appropriate file for that product. This will make the file always available for download on the product's page on the Front Office under the Attachments tab. If the customer wants a printed copy, they just have to click "Add to cart". The only problem with this solution is that you can't track who downloads the files.

Let me know whether either of these solutions fits your needs.

[Terofal]

Hey thanks for the reply - I'll give it a try when I get the site back up and running (I'm having a HUGE problem with the customer registration right now - when the customer fills in his details and hits "register" during the checkout process, the cart bounces to the root of the website, which does not hold the cart. Any ideas, people? I'm reinstalling the cart right now for the second time...)

In my case, my products are not downloadable - I must create them custom for each client, and then I email it to them, so that part of the plan won't work out, but it gives me something to try for. Before I realized the cart was bombing out during the registration process, I was experimenting with different carriers - one being mail and the other email delivery, but this will apply to all items in the cart (I presume), and not give me per-item selection of delivery options.

Thanks again, and if anyone has ideas about why the cart is leaving the checkout process bouncing to the root of the website upon registration, I'd love to hear it!

Thanks!