Using Variants & Suggested Price?

[tao]

Is there any way to have suggested price for products with Variants set up. I would like a Suggested Price to appear in the Cart when a customer adds to cart an item with Variants, but allow the customer to edit that amount in the amount field in the cart (to any amount including zero).



If I put zero as the price when setting up a Variant, then zero appears as amount/price in the cart when that Item/Variant is added to cart and the customer can edit the amount (because I selected "Let buyers edit price" in the item set up).



If I put a dollar amount as the price when setting up the Variant, that dollar amount appears in the cart when that Item/Variant is added to the cart. It appears as if the amount is editable, and allows me to type a different amount in the field, but when I click Update Cart it reverts back to the original amount, not really allowing me to edit amount in the cart.

[E-junkie_Guru]

First, a bit of background info. When you enable "Let buyer edit price" without Variants, the item's regular Price becomes the Minimum Price (which buyers cannot undercut), and the Suggested Price (which prefills the price amount when the item is added to cart) is accomplished by adding an extra amount to that Min. Price, using an &amount=X.XX parameter (where X.XX is the extra amount) tacked onto the cart button's href= or action= URL -- e.g., that URL for an item with a Sug. Price of $20 more than its Min. Price would look like this example:



https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?c=cart&i=XXXXXX&cl=YYYYYY&ejc=2&amount=20



For products using Variants together with "Let buyer edit price", the price you define for each Variant becomes the Min. Price for that Variant. In this case, there isn't a setting in Admin for Sug. Price, but you can do it manually by tacking that &amount=X.XX parameter onto the cart button's action= URL, as shown in the example above.



Unfortunately, this approach means the Sug. Price will always be greater than the Min. Price by the same flat amount for each Variant -- i.e., you can't have a larger/smaller spread between Sug. vs. Min. Prices for some Variants than others. One way around this would be to convert your Variants menu code into separate Add to Cart buttons for every possible combination of option values, so you could give each button its own &amount=X.XX parameter. This could become a bit tedious to set up if you have multiple options or many values for each option, but this tutorial walks you through the process:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.variants.button-tutorial.htm