Multiple Carts

[bamberg]

Is it possible to have multiple independent carts? I would like to have a single ej account, but multiple independent carts, that store independent subgroups of my products. This is because I'm selling to academic/b2b/individual customers, and they all have separate subsets of my products with different product numbers, and it would be good if these carts which are on different webpages would not share data with each other.



Brian

[E-junkie_Monster]

Hi Brian,



To clarify, our shopping cart always starts out empty and only tracks the items that are added to it, much like a real-world shopping cart. There's no situation where the cart starts out filled with a certain batch of items.



That said, you can still safely use the buttons provided by a single E-junkie account on many different webpages, if you want to keep certain products separate from others just don't add the buttons for those products to pages where they don't belong and it will not be possible for someone on one site to order them.



The cart is tracked by domain name, so product buttons can be used on different sites without the cart mixing even if someone is browsing both sites at the same time.

[bamberg]

Thanks for the answer. In our case the pages are on the same domain. Thats causing the problem, because the carts leak to each other.



Brian

[E-junkie_Guru]

I'm not quite clear what you mean about the carts "leaking" into each other? Every buyer gets their own cart which starts out empty, and no buyer will ever have any items in their own cart which they did not specifically add to their own cart. However, all items a buyer deliberately Adds to Cart from your site would be added to a common cart for that particular buyer.



To keep track of which cart belongs to each buyer, we set a cookie in their browser which expires 24 hours after their last cart view, so if you're testing your cart by posing as a buyer, items you'd added to a cart yesterday would still be in your own cart today. To test your cart with a "clean slate", you can clear your browser cookies, or at least delete cookies for your domain (if your cart displays as an overlay "inside" your own page) or for the e-junkie.com domain (if you cart appears in a separate window/tab).



If these subgroups are all really the same products, just with different pricing, you might consider having just one instance of every product, and use either our Variants or Discount Codes features to offer different pricing to eligible buyers:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.variants.htm#variants

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.discounts.htm

[bamberg]

I am sorry for not being clear, I know how annoying that can be. Let me describe the full situation.



I have the following products



Product A with tax

Product B with tax

Product A without tax

Product B without tax

Product C

Product D





On page www.example.com/buy you can order product A or B, and depending on wether the person has entered a European VAT Id or not she can put A/B with tax or A/B without tax into his/her shopping cart. Currently, when the person enters a VAT ID or removes it I delete the e-junkie cookie to get rid of the content of the cart, such that a cart can not contain products with and without tax.



This would be much simpler, if I could have two different carts or cookies for the with tax/without tax versions.



To make everything more complicated we also have www.example.com/buy-academic, where one can only order Product C, enter a discount code and get an academic discount.



Now if you put something in your cart on page www.example.com/buy, and go to www.example.com/buy-academic you have both products in the cart. But this is not good, because it should not be possible to buy the products from /buy with the discounts from /buy-academic, or apply the volume discounts from /buy to the products from /buy-academic.



All of these problems could be solved with different carts.



Thank you for the responses,



Brian

[E-junkie_Guru]

You might be able to accomplish that by using a combination of our standard Cart buttons, non-javascript Cart buttons, and Buy Now buttons.



When your page uses our standard E-junkie Cart button codes including at least one complete block of View Cart code, the cart displays as an overlay "inside" your page and sets cart-tracking cookies with your own domain.



When your page uses our non-javascript E-junkie Cart button codes, or if the page is using the standard codes but merely missing the javascript portion of your View Cart code, the Cart buttons in that page will work in "fallback mode" by displaying the cart in a separate window/tab, which sets cart-tracking cookies with our "e-junkie.com" domain.



As such, because of those differing cart cookie domains, items added to an overlay cart "inside" your page would not appear in the fallback cart, and vice-versa.



Finally, Buy Now buttons bypass the cart entirely and take buyers directly to instant checkout for just one item at a time. This means tax/shipping charges cannot be calculated in the cart before checkout, and only Discount Codes with certain settings can work with Buy Now buttons:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/faq.discounts.buy-now.htm

[bamberg]

Thank you for the answer. What you propose is inconvenient, because that would offer different customer experiences in the different carts, and the lack of discounts for buy-now buttons also rules them out. Maybe you can propose to your dev-team to add some code to the javascript calls which can be used to change the cookie path?



kind regards,



Brian

[E-junkie_Guru]

Honestly, I'd expect buyers would find multiple carts confusing, as they're familiar with having just one cart that contains all the items they added to it, so having some items appear in one cart and other items in a different cart would be disorienting, to the point where they might just abandon ordering entirely. I think your solution of simply resetting the cart by deleting the cart cookie when a VAT ID is added/removed is better, ideally if you also inform them of that when it happens (such as popping up an alert dialog).



As for discounts, you can create product-specific discounts that only apply to a particular product and no others. It appears your volume discounts (at least the ones clearly named as such that I found) are already set up this way, so each of those would only consider the Min. Item Quantity threshold for the relevant item and markdown that item's per-unit price accordingly. Your academic products could also have product-specific discounts of their own, which would not apply to any other products. This should prevent volume-discountable products from getting academic-product discounts and vice-versa.



You can also assign the same Discount Code to multiple discounts -- just make sure you give each one a unique Discount Name, as that's how we distinguish one discount from another -- so buyers would only need to enter that code in their cart once to apply a discount to every item in their cart that has a discount matching that code.