Mal's Cart Question...

[plainmabel]

You can have the quantity set in Mal's, so someone can put just one thing in the cart when they press the Add to Cart button on the product page, but this can easily be overridden by entering more than one in the cart quantity field in the cart itself.  The cart can't "know" how many of an item you have, or stop people from doing this.  That's why it helps a lot to have a database set up, like the ones from cartkeeper.com or optioncart.com.  But even then, occasionally, someone will override it to try to get more than one.  It's so rare that that actually happens though -- only happened to me once in the whole time my site has been in business.

If you want to try out what I mean, go to my site and pick an item that there is only one of, like a handbag.  On the PRODUCT page, enter 2, and you'll see when you try to Add to Cart it won't let you (b/c it's referring to the database which knows there's only one).  So then just add the 1 to the cart.  Then when you're in the CART page, enter 2 in the Quantity field -- it WILL let you do this b/c the Mal's cart doesn't know your database's inventory.

[sarah_1980]

Okay. So if you put the code "noqty" in your mal's cart html what does that do physically?

It says in the mal's support documents that it "turns off the carts' quantity box" and that "there may be occasions when you don't want a quantity box in the cart. For example if the "product" is a donation or you only have a limited quantity of it. You can do this using a field named noqty in your Buy Now links..."

 

I take it this doesn't actually turn off the quantity box when the customer views their cart but only when the customer adds something to the cart they can't enter in a quantity of the item.

Gee whiz hope I'm half making sense !

[OldQlts]

Okay. So if you put the code "noqty" in your mal's cart html what does that do physically?

try it and see? 

it sounds like it would allow the shopper to just buy one of each item at a time, but it's not going to do anything as far as updating your web site re: being sold out or about the quantity left in stock.

i occasionally see a web site that *seems* to be database-driven, where the quantity probably updates itself automatically, but i have yet to figure out how this works. i'm investigating databases as a possible option for my own site, but i have MUCH to learn yet!

[plainmabel]

i occasionally see a web site that *seems* to be database-driven, where the quantity probably updates itself automatically, but i have yet to figure out how this works.

Mine has the capability to do this (cartkeeper.com), by passing data back and forth from Mal's.  But I don't have that portion implemented.  The reason I don't is that sometimes a customer will go all the way through the cart, choose PayPal, and then decide against it -- the items would be removed from inventory but the sale would be incomplete.  Then the customer may come back right away to try again with a different payment method and not be able to order the items b/c they're listed as out of stock.  If I didn't have PayPal as a payment option, I would have this automatic inventory updating implemented b/c it would be a great help.

[OldQlts]

plainmabel, thanks for the heads up on that! is this something that could be fixed (by, i guess, the cartkeeper programmers)?

i've even been thinking about trying to learn PHP and mySQL so i could try to put something together on my own, but i think that would take too much time away from my art.

[plainmabel]

The problem is that there's absolutely no way for CartKeeper or Mal's to know that the person has actually PAID with PayPal.  Once they are sent to the PayPal site, everything is in the PayPal environment and no data can be passed from PayPal back to the cart, so the cart can't know whether the person paid or just bailed.  It's not something that can be fixed, or even done through your own programming since PayPal runs entirely independently of your cart.

[OldQlts]

thanks for the explanation! it makes sense now.

[rejectedblueziti]

Hey there,

So.  I only make one of each thing I have; I tried to set up maal's cart, but it won't let me sell just one of each thing.  Does paypal let you sell just one item?

Or, even better, does anyone know how to make a form that doesn't just open up ms outlook when it is sent?

How do you all with one of a kind things make it so that just one can be sold?

I realize I've asked about the cart before.  The consensus was that you can't limit.

[bluaria]

I don't know about the form thing but I do know that paypal does have a button choice that only sells one item at a time. 

[missmatches]

i use paypal's shopping cart, but before that, i had little "buy it now" buttons with a quantity option on my old site that you didn't need a merchant's account for. this is all through paypal. what you do is...

1) go to www.paypal.com
2) click on the merchant tools tab
3) under "Website Payments" there is a "Buy Now Buttons" link, click on that

from there you will find out all about it. there are several problems with this though, because for some reason, the shipping is not calculated in this so you need to figure a system out for that. i hope this helps, i too have ran into some problems with this as well.