Mark Bowen Shopping Cart Plug-in

Why would you send any of it to paypal?

This is getting complicated now the more I get into it.

The end result I want is an entry into a weblog (bookings) that holds all the information for each individual course booking (name, address, age, telephone,gender etc.)

The problem is, that a parent may want to book multiple courses for multiple children. I need a complete weblog entry for every child/course for admin purposes.

What I don’t want, is to have to force the parent to type in the common fields (address, phone etc.) for each and every child/course or have to register before they book.

Then I want to send them to PayPal to pay one amount. Then I’ll have the problem of reconciling the payments to the individual weblog entries.

I do seem to have got myself ‘up the creek without a paddle’, any suggestions of a better way to achieve my aims would be welcome. You can see where I’m up to so far and an idea of what the sites about at stramash.eu/courses. The design is very basic and not complete yet, just trying to get something up to allow bookings and get some income in.

It sounds and looks like you are ok in where you are heading. I don’t think you can accomplish what you are wanting to do without some sort of trickery though. The kicker is one to many relationship of parent to children. If you make the registration about the parent and add multiple fields for children then maybe feed them the kids as a drop down when they select the class? You could even use conditional logic to see if there are multiple kids and feed multiple drop downs so they can register multiple kids at once. I have to say that the If Then logic is what is going to save your butt on this one. If you are not familiar with it then you may want to read up on it.

M.

Hi

I am interested in testing out this for a site I am currently working on… I hate the fact that SCM + Paypal windows pop up with every item added to the cart.

Will this allow • The user to add an item to their cart without the paypal site popping up? • Display the carts contents & display total number of items in cart on my site • Remove items from cart via my site

Currently I am using SCM + PLAYA to link multiple variations of a product to a single listing, any possible conflicts here with this plugin?

Any screenshots etc? the EEtemplates site, does not go into any great detail about this plugin.

Cheers Lee

Hi Lee,

Hi I am interested in testing out this for a site I am currently working on… I hate the fact that SCM + Paypal windows pop up with every item added to the cart.

Me too 😉 that’s why I created the plugin 😊

Will this allow • The user to add an item to their cart without the paypal site popping up? • Display the carts contents & display total number of items in cart on my site • Remove items from cart via my site

Yes, yes and yes 😉 You can see it in operation on this site that I created for a client but please just don’t send any checkout forms across as that is a live site 😉

Currently I am using SCM + PLAYA to link multiple variations of a product to a single listing, any possible conflicts here with this plugin?

Absolutely none that I know of and as this is a plugin it shouldn’t interfere with anything in your system at all 😊

Any screenshots etc? the EEtemplates site, does not go into any great detail about this plugin.

A few posts up I attached the documentation which tells you a bit more about it. Hope that helps a bit. Any more questions you might have though please do feel free to fire away.

Best wishes,

Mark

Sold!

just to confirm, this will send the user off to paypal checkout once they are ready?

Thanks Mark..

Sold! just to confirm, this will send the user off to paypal checkout once they are ready? Thanks Mark..

Yep everything is just the same as usual except that you only send the person off to PayPal when you want them to go instead of having a window pop up each and every time which is really quite annoying 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

This is a great plugin… Mark, you are awesome! Now if only simple commerce or some easy addition could support subscriptions.

This is a great plugin… Mark, you are awesome!

Thanks for the kind words. Did you purchase it then? I can’t remember now all the people who have purchased it although I do have most in my address book, couldn’t see you in there but perhaps you purchased under a different name?

Now if only simple commerce or some easy addition could support subscriptions.

Yep I know what you mean although not an easy one that as you really need to be using Cron to do that. I don’t think there’s any other real way of doing it.

Best wishes,

Mark

Nope! I haven’t purchased it, but I wish I could!… I need subscriptions for what I’m working on now, so I purchased FoxEE… which has a cart.

I think there is a bit of an issue with Cron in FoxEE as well. I have only recently purchased the module and I’m trying to figure out all the implications of the subscriptions and stuff. They recommend using the Cron plugin, but I thought that wasn’t a “real” Cron job in the sense that it doesn’t run in the background automatically. I need to look in to that, but I’ve noticed some postings on FoxEE forum and someone requesting server Cron jobs… the FoxEE guys are getting back to them.

Paypal itself seems like a good choice for subscriptions. In their API they provide a bunch of examples of listeners… I think your listener would be on all the time… with that, I don’t think you’d necessarily need to use Cron. Your listener gets a subscription cancellation and then it calls code to downgrade the group in EE or something to that effect. I’m not great with this stuff, so I could be very wrong. Why would you need to use Cron?

I like your sample site… The shopping cart is integrated very nicely and works really well. I think this plugin is great because it builds upon simple commerce… which people can mostly use just fine for a lot of websites. EE needs more additions that build on that module.

Thanks for letting me know about your plugin Mark! I remember starting a thread about this a while back and you had messaged me as fast as always. My research found a semi-elegant solution at http://www.thewojogroup.com/2008/10/simplecartjs-paypal-e-commerce-in-minutes, dubbed simpleCart(js).

Will consider your offering.. Are there are any pro’s to using yours as opposed to simplyCart(js)?

As a designer with limited programming skills, I’m always up for what can improve my workflow and wouldn’t mind grabbing your plugin.

Thanks for letting me know about your plugin Mark! I remember starting a thread about this a while back and you had messaged me as fast as always. My research found a semi-elegant solution at http://www.thewojogroup.com/2008/10/simplecartjs-paypal-e-commerce-in-minutes, dubbed simpleCart(js). Will consider your offering.. Are there are any pro’s to using yours as opposed to simplyCart(js)?

I made it 😊

Also it works directly with ExpressionEngine and if you want it to PayPal and the Simple Commerce Module. I did see that post quite a while back when it first came out and it is a nice elegant solution but this plugin can allow you to achieve all of that if you have some Ajax skills. The plugin on its own doesn’t deal with Ajax but it can be done as around 4 people who have purchased the plugin have already done this kind of thing on their sites so it can be done.

As a designer with limited programming skills, I’m always up for what can improve my workflow and wouldn’t mind grabbing your plugin.

If you’re interested then if you head over to the EETemplates.com site then you can purchase it if you want to 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

My thoughts are that Mark’s cart using Simple Commerce would be quite a bit more secure than simplyCart(js). I would think anyway… any thoughts on that Mark? It looks like the js cart has no backend processing with it…

My thoughts are that Mark’s cart using Simple Commerce would be quite a bit more secure than simplyCart(js). I would think anyway… any thoughts on that Mark? It looks like the js cart has no backend processing with it…

Well actually my cart is neither secure nor in-secure 😉 The cart is literally just acting as a cart. The payment handling / processing side of things is handled by whoever (PayPal as an example) and so the cart doesn’t hold any information about the person or their credit card details or anything like that. Definitely better to leave that to the Payment Processor as then that way there is one less area in the loop to have to worry about.

If the Payment Processor says that you are covered and something goes wrong then your clients first port of call will be them instead of you! 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

Oh, I know that part… I’m talking more about the ability to change prices and email address that is sent to paypal from the system. Complaints about the js cart involve that and js injection attacks. I think that, because you are linking in to Simple Commerce, there is less of a worry about that sort of thing… Or, is that not the case? Perhaps Simple Commerce has those problems as well?