I need a creative way or the cusomer to designate a pick up time and day for their purchase. I will provide a list of available options. Currently I have it set up as a product with $0.00 price. See www.frozeninthyme.com/shop . However this arrange looks awkward. Looking for ideas.
Heather

I am trying to understand what it is your shop is trying to do. Are you trying to have a customer come to a website to purchase a service and then sign up for a time for that service?

If that is the case you do not need to use pro cart.

The easiest way to do what you want to do is to just create a regular webpage and add a paypal button through your pay pal account. You can set it up so that they have to enter the price based upon a particular service, or you can create the price yourself.

Go to your paypal account and click profile. Then click on see my buttons. From there you can create a new button.

I think that if you're going to use the SCC Pro, which although isn't absolutely needed as The Philosopher mentioned is still an ok way to do it, you will need to setup a few different Optional Fields for each item.
I would suggest something like:

Date for Pickup:
date 1
date 2
date 3
date 4
etc. for as many dates as you need available but you'll need to keep it manageable and of course you'll need to update it regularly to accommodate new dates and remove the old etc.

Time for Pickup: (this one shouldn't need changing, just put in your regular hours that you would normally allow pickups)
pickup time 1
pickup time 2
pickup time 3
pickup time 4
pickup time 5
etc. to incorporate all your available pickup times.

If you do decide to keep using SCC Pro for your shop, which I think is quite feasible, just resolve yourself to having to do daily or at the very least bi-daily updates for the dates of pickup so it stays current. One thing that you might want to be able to consider is to put all your products that are available on the same dates and times in the same exact category so that you can use the Shared Optional Fields checkbox. This will save you time when updating the dates for the fields so that it will then share it with the rest of that category, making you only need to update 1 product to update them all at the same time

Hope that helps and good luck whichever way you decide to roll with it

We are using cart pro because I wanted a way to display the 70 products we have available by categories so the customer can search though this variety easier and search for specific items based on theeir ingredients. We also have a dozen monthly specials that customers can pre-order and holiday specials that they can pre-order. Most of the products cannot be pre-ordred and only purchased in the store, so these would be set up as a separate shopping cart pulished as a catalog. The pre-ordered products would be in a shopping cart linked to a pay pal account so customers can pre-pay as well.


Most orders contain 5-10 items.

Heather

I would think then that the Optional Fields method should work pretty well for what you need then. It will need constant upkeep if it's items that can be ordered at anytime and picked up anytime, but...

IF it's mostly just Holiday and special event items, then for that it should be pretty easy for dates and times and it shouldn't need much of any updating on a constant basis since the dates and times will most likely be around that holiday or event.

Heather... don't forget that you can actually add sums of money in the optional fields which will be added to the basic price. Maybe this might add a new dimension to what can be done. I have done this in my own store to add gift wrapping options.

So I would add all the pick up date and times as optional fields for every product? So if the customer buys 10 products they would have to designate their pick up 10 times if the field is required or just ask them to be sure to put it in on of their items. In my experience customers will not do it if it is not a required step in the process.

Is their some customization possible in the shipping area? There is a "ad note to seller" in the PayPal check out that I'll look at as well. maybe their is a way to customize their checkout within PayPal to require a step to designate their pick up.
Thanks

Heather

Hiya Heather,

Unfortunately yes, you would have to include that for any and all items sold separately. As for the PayPal customization, I really don't know if it's usable or not, I guess check it out and see unless someone here can verify whether it will incorporate or not. I'm thinking not, but I've never tried it so I am not sure sorry.