Same product ID with custom description in BasketIF

[BruceLee]

Dear Team,

In our project, we'd like to limit numbers of product ID. We cannot afford to put tens of thousands of products with same price, similar type. Instead, we want to pass a brief description to BasketIF when user adds the product to cart.

For example, a product is Financial Article, all $5; another product is Medical Article, all $3. When user buys an article, we need to show the title of article in Basket.

In current BasketIF, the only field in table 'basket' appears to be productID, which auto refers to the id in 'product' table for some functions like getTotalPrice().

Is any way the application can pass/retrieve custom info to BasketIf, just like the 'custom' field in table 'order'?

Thanks a lot,
-Bruce

[julie]

Hello Bruce,

I suggest that you do have a separate product with unique SKU for each article. Alternatively you could have one product with many options although this isn't really feasible with thousands of options.

If each article is a separate product with a unique SKU and correct name, this will ensure that all of the features of KonaKart will work correctly such as the invoice, the callback when an order is made etc. and from the order you will always be able to track down exactly what was bought.

Just out of curiosity, if you don't have all of your products in the catalog, how can a customer find them ?

Regards,

Julie

[BruceLee]

Thank Julie for response.

Our webapp is not a pure online store. Users needn't see the catalog of products. Users visit our website to get free information and interaction. If he see an valuable article or report (we can have tens of thousands), he can be directed to buy it.

Our webapp usually generates the articles/reports dynamically from data in our database. And many article related data are not added by our admin, but dynamically added by users. The product doesn't have sku since it can be 'virtual' downloadable product. So when our website is online, most products are even unknown. It's interesting project and huge potential, we believe.

One category of article/report has same price. We like to put a common product ID for one category because it makes our webapp development much easier and also reduce administration cost of manually putting similar info in KK database.

If the BasketIF has a custom field like those in Order, it will be good for our app. We can put our article ID in this custom field, then display proper description when showing shoppingCart. When user places order, this custom description and download link will go to products_name field in orders_products table. Thus when the user checks his Orders later, he can still view all purchase info.

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
-Bruce