Populate Cart with Item and Quanity

jpwatters · May 1, 2005

Quote:
Originally Posted by onethumb
I'm sure this will happen at some point, but for right now, the URL is very simple:

https://www.smugmug.com/cart/?ImageID=#

That'll toss the item in the cart.

Don

Don,

https://www.smugmug.com/cart/?ImageID=# almost works for me.

I would like to pre-populate the cart with the ImageID and the Product

for example I would like to

https://www.smugmug.com/cart/?ImageID=123456&Product="4x6 Glossy"&Quanity=1

or something like

https://www.smugmug.com/cart/?ImageID=123456&ProductID_USERGALLERYPRICINGINDEX="50545"&Quanity=1

the "4x6 Glossy" could be a numerical index or whatever would work for you.

I would like to let user experience be as one click as possible. They could select any other items that they would like from the smugmug cart as they finalize the order. I would like to have a link that adds a 4x6, 5x7, 8x10 for them, as well as they could click on the custom link and use the SM cart to add any of the items to it.

..jpw

Still wondering if there is an existing url to populate the shopping cart with both an image number and item selection w/quanity

..jpw

onethumb · May 1, 2005

Sounds pretty problematic to me. After shipping a million prints, we've learned quite a few things, and one of them is that the customer doesn't always know what they want. They *think* they want a 4x6 print, but since they took the picture with a 4:3 aspect camera, it will either chop off someone's head or have white bars. It turns out that's even worse, so what they *really* want is a 4x5.3, even though they never knew it until that second.

There are lots of other gotchas, too, which is why our shopping cart is on it's 5th major revision and is the focus of an inordinate amount of developer time.

I'll think about it, but I'm not confident.

As far as the API goes, I'm not sure we'll ever expose any cart functionality via the API for the following reasons. I'd love to get some feedback on them, though, and see what people think:

- First, we're never going to let you do anything beyond adding things to the cart and customizing those things. Customers are too paranoid about their billing information and whatnot to relegate that to a 3rd party application, plugin, or service. So steps #2 and beyond (billing, shipping, confirmation, ordering) are probably never going to be exposed. Order status checking, though, might be able to be exposed.... hmm.

- Second, when adding things to the cart, that cart is tracked via cookie. Are you willing to be responsible for getting that cookie via the API and then passing it back to the web browser somehow, whether that's IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or whatever? If not, they'll have a nice full cart that they can't view.

I suppose I could just leave the cart cookie transfer in the hands of the developer and hope for the best, but I'm not sure I like how messy it could get and how much customer support it could generate for smugmug.

Don

jpwatters · December 26, 2005

Populate Cart with Item and Quanity
Don,

Just checking back to see if the functionallity of adding a item to the shopping card.

Comments on your "First" response - I agree with just limiting it adding items to the cart. Leaving the ordering, Billing, shipping and confirmation in the hands of professionals at SmugMug is likely the best.

Comments on your "Second" response - We would like to see some kind of functionallity to building a cookie, possibly reading the cookie, and deleting cookie, and or it contents.

This is all in order to allow seemless order fullfillment.

Still Searching the forums for answers,

..jpw

onethumb wrote:

Sounds pretty problematic to me. After shipping a million prints, we've learned quite a few things, and one of them is that the customer doesn't always know what they want. They *think* they want a 4x6 print, but since they took the picture with a 4:3 aspect camera, it will either chop off someone's head or have white bars. It turns out that's even worse, so what they *really* want is a 4x5.3, even though they never knew it until that second.

There are lots of other gotchas, too, which is why our shopping cart is on it's 5th major revision and is the focus of an inordinate amount of developer time.

I'll think about it, but I'm not confident.

As far as the API goes, I'm not sure we'll ever expose any cart functionality via the API for the following reasons. I'd love to get some feedback on them, though, and see what people think:

- First, we're never going to let you do anything beyond adding things to the cart and customizing those things. Customers are too paranoid about their billing information and whatnot to relegate that to a 3rd party application, plugin, or service. So steps #2 and beyond (billing, shipping, confirmation, ordering) are probably never going to be exposed. Order status checking, though, might be able to be exposed.... hmm.

- Second, when adding things to the cart, that cart is tracked via cookie. Are you willing to be responsible for getting that cookie via the API and then passing it back to the web browser somehow, whether that's IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or whatever? If not, they'll have a nice full cart that they can't view.

I suppose I could just leave the cart cookie transfer in the hands of the developer and hope for the best, but I'm not sure I like how messy it could get and how much customer support it could generate for smugmug.

Don