Mark Bowen Shopping Cart Plug-in

Just a quick post to let everyone know that Mark Bowen has allowed me to post his shopping cart plug-in for sale on EETemplates.com. For those of you that are looking for a bit more functionality using Simple Commerce I have found this plug-in excellent to use. It is easy to integrate into existing sites, has cart capabilities and allows you to use the weblog functionality for displaying items since it uses Simple Commerce. Add linklocker to it and you have an excellent and secure way to sell downloadable products. Blog Entry Product Details Plus it helps out a very very active member from the forums. Thanks for all your contributions to this community Mark! M.

Marcus you are a true gent for placing this on your site for download, thank you for that.

A a quick aside for anyone reading this just to let you know that whilst the plugin integrates very nicely with the Simple Commerce Module it can however also be used standalone to provide you with a shopping cart for your site where you could effectively create your own form or routine to send the details / information off to wherever you wish. I only use the Simple Commerce Module to store the costs of the entries / items as the module is already there and very easy to use. This also provides people with excellent integration in case they do want to carry on and use the rest of the Simple Commerce Modules functionality.

Best wishes,

Mark

I’ve used this too, though haven’t quite made it to production yet, and can confirm it is very nice and easy to use.

You could have come up with a more original name for it though :lol:

Nah, I wanted to give credit where credit is due. Besides most of the devs here use their name as attributes in the name ala Mark Huot, Leevi Graham and such. Anyway… 😉

What? No color options? I NEED a green one 😊

Suggestion: It would be nice to see some documentation and/or feature list. I’ve seen Mark’s plugin so I know what it’s about but shopping carts are varied animals - one size does not fit all. Therefore, it’ll help people decide if this is the right tool for the job..

Hi Arun,

Excellent point about the documentation there, thanks.

I’ve attached the documentation to this post so that people can see what it’s all about. That said the template codes will not really be of any use to anyone but hopefully a couple of pages will help explain a little more what it’s all about.

Best wishes,

Mark

That said the template codes will not really be of any use to anyone but hopefully a couple of pages will help explain a little more what it’s all about.

True, the syntax itself isn’t helpful without the actual plugin. But as you say, it’ll offer some details about the specific functionality behind it.

Mark, has this been improved upon at all since we last spoke about it (i.e. any new features/tweaks?)

That said the template codes will not really be of any use to anyone but hopefully a couple of pages will help explain a little more what it’s all about.

True, the syntax itself isn’t helpful without the actual plugin. But as you say, it’ll offer some details about the specific functionality behind it. Mark, has this been improved upon at all since we last spoke about it (i.e. any new features/tweaks?)

Hiya,

Not too sure which version you got when you purchased but I’m going to e-mail you the latest version right now. The documentation does explain to anyone who’s interested though exactly what this does nowadays.

Hopefully some people will find it useful.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks Mark. It is the same version 😊

I have just posted a request for help and am now wondering if this is a solution.

Looking at the Helicentre site it didn’t ask me to register first, is that correct?

My target aims looks similar to that site. I have parents booking outdoor activity courses, possibly for more than 1 child or/and more than 1 course, so a cart system is required.

I then need to collect other info to be stored in a weblog (DOB, age,gender,dietary req etc.) You seem to be collecting stuff not required for payment on the checkout form, so is my need achievable?

Hi Paul,

I have just posted a request for help and am now wondering if this is a solution. Looking at the Helicentre site it didn’t ask me to register first, is that correct?

In this case that is correct yes but only because the payment is being handled externally and so the users don’t need to register first. In fact you really only need people to register on your site first if you want to store the purchase details using the Simple Commerce Module IPN callback routine.

My target aims looks similar to that site. I have parents booking outdoor activity courses, possibly for more than 1 child or/and more than 1 course, so a cart system is required.

The cart plugin will definitely allow you to do all of that.

I then need to collect other info to be stored in a weblog (DOB, age,gender,dietary req etc.) You seem to be collecting stuff not required for payment on the checkout form, so is my need achievable?

I would say your best bet on that would be to use either Freeform whereby you would have the form set up to catch all the other items and then the cart plugin would just fill in what items the person is booking for.

With Freeform it does have the Freeform Entries Tag which would allow you to output data in any way you like much like the weblog tags so you could perhaps build your own administrative page where you can see all the details etc…

Hope that helps a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks Mark

The problem with Freeform is that the only place to edit the data is in the CP and with 100’s of entries and lots of fields it is not very user friendly.

It needs to be simple enough that if someone phoned up with a query the administrator could just call up the data and edit it. There do not seem to be any options to control how the CP admin page displays the entries (sort by a field or go to id no.).

This needs to cope with about 100 bookings a month.

Seems like a good fit for the plugin and simple commerce. Just put the request for registration information later in the process just wrap whatever information is to be displayed I’m the if logged_in conditional. If they log in the can continue . If not then they either log in or register and come back to the checkout screen. Then you can manage whatever extra information you need using the membership module.

Thanks to Mark in another post I found the LogMeIn plugin.

I am now thinking that I could use this along with a SAEF to collect the data into a weblog without requiring people to register.

What I still need to work out is how to collect the data I need and only send some of it to PayPal.

Why would you send any of it to paypal? What I imagine you are trying to do is accept all the information including the credit card number on your website and then after they submit the form send that data to paypal? That is not really doable. And even if it were you would be really taking on a lot of security risk. SSL or not I would not want to have my information procesed in that manner. What you can do though is create a button for a set amount and then send them over to paypal only after they have filled in the required fields on the SAEF form.

If I am wrong about the process you are trying to accomplish let me know. Would love to help out if I can…