"Shopping Cart" feature, monthly ads

[pasmith]

Hello all,

I've just given my first demo to The Powers That Be and they had a few problems with how the software works. I wondered if anyone has suggestions for work-arounds or modules to solve these problems.

The first problem was the lack of a 'shopping cart' kind of functionality. They want a customer to be able to buy several ads, then pay for them all in one transaction. I haven't found a way to offer that 'natively' but I may have missed something.

The second problem is, how to offer monthly ads? In other words, we want a user to be able to buy an ad to run (for example) in Sept, Oct & December and pay for all 3 months up front. Has anyone figured out a way to offer that kind of functionality?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

There is no shopping cart built into the software as you have already concluded. One workaround is to sell a coupon with a fixed dollar value, although this would have to be paid for in a different manner such as a separate page with a paypal button.

As far as a 3 month ad, you can easily setup 90 day package listings. On my site I offer many different lengths of duration for my ads which also dependent on the category it will be listed in. For instance, In my Real Estate category I offer packages with 30. 90 and 180 day durations, however for vehicles I offer 10, 30 and 60 day durations.

Hope that helps!

-Mike

[pasmith]

Thanks Mike, I appreciate the input.

I'm hoping against hope that someone pops in to announce a shopping card module, or that I can convince the higher-ups that we can do without such a feature (I'm unconvinced vendors are going to buy a number of ads at any one time).

And I'm still trying to figure out the other problem. I should've included more data in my post. We're selling ads for a magazine (as well as a website and a newsletter). So while my example used Sept, Oct and Dec, it might be more like the September, December and March issues, based on when an advertiser is announcing new products.

Hmm, but maybe I could still sell in terms of "time units" and then have them pick the actual issue dates. So they'd buy a "3-issue" package and then as an extra field, specify which issues they wanted to appear in. Hmmm (kind of thinking out loud here).

[Lhotch +]

At one time there was a "membership" where you could purcahse the ability to post X amount of ads between now and a distant point in time.

However, for every person that liked the way it worked, there was someone who didnt like the way it worked. So that feature was removed until a new approach could be figured out.

What you may want to look at doing for your client is simply sell a coupon. Then define the coupon in admin. The coupon could in turn be used during checkout so they could place X numbers of ads of a certain ad package type.