Want "Add To Cart" Button To Add Multiple Items With One Click

I have a database table filled with 16 different products. I want to bundle five specific products into a "package" and add all five products to the shopping cart with one click of the Add To Cart button. I have a valid PHP recordset consisting of five rows and all the required columns are filled in.

What I can't seem to do is find a way to make the Add To Cart button "loop" through the recordset adding each product one at a time. It always stops after it enters the first product and will not add anything else.

I do not want to make my users click on five different Add To Cart buttons. I want them to click on 1 Add To Cart button.

Also I really don't want to have spend more money on another WebAssist product. I bought eCart and I'm mildly surprised it doesn't do multiple items. I don't think that's a rare scenario in business. Companies package their goods into bundles all the time.

Can anyone help? Did I miss something?

you will need to have DataAssist to be able to accomplish this.

in the archived documentation section of the eCart support page, see the "Building a Multiple Item Add to Cart Interface". It was written for eCart 3, but the process is still the same in eCart5.

Let me see if I understand this correctly ...

For $200, I get an Add To Cart button that does just one product per click.

If I want to add 2 products with just one click, I need to pay $400.

Um, yeah, that dog ain't gonna hunt. That's not an acceptable answer. Nowhere in the documentation for eCart does it say anything about this restriction. Or that you need another $200 product to do something that's pretty darn basic in business.

Signed,

Disappointed.

Okay, I have read the tutorial on how to make one click on an Add To Cart button add multiple items (a bundle) to the Shopping Cart.

The tutorial discusses a sample database called Blue Sky Footwear. I have searched all the Webassist support resources I can find ... documentation, archived, documentation, zip files, pdf's, scripts, forums, whatever ...

And I can find no tools needed to build and fill the sample database called Blue Sky Footwear. Please don't tell me that you pointed me toward a tutorial that references a sample database that no longer exists.

Getting angry ...

looking more closely at what you are trying to do, i don't think a multiple item add to cart is really not the correct approach.

with a multiple item add to cart, the cart items are not dependent on each other. meaning that if you added the bundled products as a individual products, any one of them could be removed, there by breaking the bundle.


It would make more sense to create one product that is the bundle. One product that represents the products in the bundle, so rather than adding multiple line items to the cart, you really only add 1 line item, and that product that is added is in reality all of the products that are in the bundle.



As for the blue sky footwear database, that is replaced by the blue sky music database in the SiteAssist and DataAssist: Solution Recipe Files that can be found in the data assist download center page.

I know you mean well but please don't try to talk me out of my design goal. The purpose of putting multiple items into the cart is to get a discount on a specific bundle of products. In my case, it's FIVE products. If the customer buys Product A, B, C, D and E, they get a discount.

If they don't want all five, let's say they don't want Product B, they can remove Product B and still have A, C, D and E in their cart but no discount.

Your suggestion is all or nothing ... With using one product to represent all five, either all five are in the cart or all five are out of the cart. There's no other option. And that's not what I want.

Also, if you wrap all five into a "sixth" product that represents all of them, then it's much more difficult to track sales of the individual products. If I want to know how much of A that I sold, I have to sum up all the sales of individual A and then I have to count all the packages that it might be "hidden" in. That won't be easy.

Thanks for the tip on Blue Sky. It might help now if you guys updated that old tutorial that talks about Blue Sky Footwear. It's not a lot of fun to go searching for something that doesn't exist.

Bob Hunt

I'm not trying to talk you out of anything, only trying to give another option.

The Term "Bundle" can be used a few ways, so there are multiple ways to skin that cat....

If the suggestion does not work for you, then you don't have to use it, no worries.

I'll pass your comments on to the documentation department.

Well, I finally got this to work but it sure wasn't easy.

1) Yes, I had to spend an extra $200 to buy DataAssist which doesn't make me real happy but I'm sure I'll find other uses for it some other day so it's not a total loss.

2) In all honesty, the tutorial you recommend is worthless. I'm sure it had value when it was written but it's badly in need of overhaul now. Not only does it reference a sample database (Blue Sky Footwear) that no longer exists but it also covers just one multiple item scenario, that is, when you present your user with a column of optional checkboxes next to your product listing.

I needed that scenario but I also needed to be able to put multiple items in the cart *without* checkboxes too. In other words, I have a "bundle" of products that go together unconditionally. I didn't want to make my users click on five checkboxes every time. I just wanted one Add To Cart button to dump five products into the Cart. No other thought process needed.

Anyway, I got that to work too. If anyone wants to know how it's done, drop me a line and I'l be glad to help. In the meantime, if the Webassist team would consider it, I wouldn't mind re-writing the tutorial for you if you're short on resources.

Bob Hunt

Thank you for the offer, we plan to redo that tutorial in the near future though.