I have a customer that needs to include an optional dropdown for a zero cost item. The best way to illustrate this is to imagine a site that sells items as fundraisers. The customer selects an item for purchase, but before the checkout is selected, they need to be able to select the organization this purchase goes to benefit.

As an example, http://www.greenraising.com has this functionality. You select an item and place it in your cart, then under the item a drop down appears requesting you to select your affiliate.

I did toy around with the software and can put in an item, then go to the more options tab and create the drop down. (and don't forget, to get the zero-cost item I also had to put in some cost, then the same for a discount since you can't save or preview a zero-cost item)

The problems there are as follows: first, I can't 'enforce' anyone to make this selection. To get it to stand out, I can put it in a category all by itself, but still I have no mechanism to ensure anyone makes a selection of the options in this item. That is a bit problematic when you want to ensure the user selects who / what organization benefits from this purchase. So having an option that shows up in the cart (in a global fashion) for any purchase would be an ideal way to proceed, but I don't see how that can be done.

As a work around, I could create a button in PayPal, and have the customer choose the selection first before presenting items, but what that will do is open PayPal in another page - and certainly disjoints the concept of keeping all items in the shopping cart until checkout.

Can those who have ideas about how to best approach this issue chime in? Do I really need to make a new feature request for this, or am I overlooking something that the cart is capable of doing? I appreciate the feedback!

Hiya Bryan,

I "think", if I'm understanding you correctly, that you will be able to do something along the lines of this with the Pro version. Forcing choices will be a nice feature we've needed, and when you put in the Choices in the More Options Fields it will have a toggle that tells it to force them to make a choice to complete their purchase.

I'm not sure if this will suffice for what you're after or not, but it is a possibility maybe? You'll have to wait on Pro version to see if the feature is completely added and to see if it will work for your needs. Shouldn't be too long now Jo Ann

http://lbwebsites.com - Web Design & Web Hosting
http://cattownrescue.org ... Current project in the works, love cats!
http://northbaldwinliteracycouncil.org .... Our local Literacy Council

Due to spammers the below sites are not viewable outside the US, sorry guys
http://proudayou.com - My sons website for his music business
http://rockinwithmainstreet.com - My brother's band website

Thanks for the response Jo Ann. I hope I was clear about the 'enforce a selection'. But it may be a bit more. Since it's not really a 'product', this is really a work around. Here's the logic (or my attempt at the logic).

Customer gets any product or multiple products to place in the cart for purchase.

Need to have the ability to select what organization this total purchase goes to support.

* So this is just a basic drop down menu item asking the customer to make a selection from a list of options presented to them
* It would be great to have the ability to 'enforce' (or the proper term is require) them to make a selection before sending the entire cart off to PayPal for payment processing, however just allowing them a way to make this selection from within the 'view cart' and not having to create a new item/product for purchase is the optimal solution to get this in front of the customer

Now, if I was to code this on static pages using PayPal, I would just create another 'add to cart' button with these items as a drop down selection. And, I still could do this, but that destroys the concept of keeping everything in the cart! So that is a last resort option in my mind.

I could add the code on the actual 'View Cart' page, but the behavior of the button would still (by default) open a new window pointing to PayPal. If I had a way to change that behavior in the HTML of that page to place this information in the code being passed to the cart...then I'd be on to something. Alas, I'm not much with PHP...

Thanks again for the response!

Hiya Bryan,

Yeah I see what you mean there. What I'm proposing isn't a end of cart option though, it's a product option. I don't see an end of cart option coming very soon, but one can never tell lol.

In the meantime, you could create an Option Field in a bogus product, add the choices in the options field for your dropdown on that product so they can choose the organization to apply that product to. Then turn on the share options feature so that it shares that option with every product in that category, no need to create that option for each product this way.
Then copy that product to your other categories to share it with those also.
Now you have all your products with a shared option field that will create a choice for your customers to choose an affiliate to credit with that purchase (or whatever your circumstance may be for your information in your dropdown).
When you get the order, each item will have it's choice listed. You now have a way to credit that purchase.

This will of course not give you a total purchase setup where you know what the whole purchase went for in one shot, but it will give you at least a way to do what you're thinking. Even if they choose more than one affiliate (one product to one, one product to another) it's better than NO way to credit it? Just a thought

At the moment this is not "requireable" (is that a word even? LOL) but soon you will be able to require people to make those choices to complete their purchase Jo Ann

http://lbwebsites.com - Web Design & Web Hosting
http://cattownrescue.org ... Current project in the works, love cats!
http://northbaldwinliteracycouncil.org .... Our local Literacy Council

Due to spammers the below sites are not viewable outside the US, sorry guys
http://proudayou.com - My sons website for his music business
http://rockinwithmainstreet.com - My brother's band website