AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I need to setup products so that they are only purchasable in quantities of 10, 25, etc. For example, wedding invitations, note cards, and other paper products are sold in increments of 25, 50, 75, etc. on up to 1,000. Frankly, I'm very surprised AbleCommerce doesn't support this already, but it is something we should have caught during our evaluation before we started converting form our current platform. Instead, it slipped past us.

Changing product descriptions to say "Sold in Sets of 10", "Sold in Sets of 25", etc. would be a very large detriment to our online business. All of our competitors price items individually but force the quantity selection to be a dropdown menu with 25, 50, ... It would also negatively affect how our prices appear in product feeds compared to them.

My thought is to add a product template with a merchant field for the quantity increment. Then look for that in the product page and change the quantity spinner to a dropdown. The dropdown would start at the min quantity, 25 for example and then add rows in quantity increments on up to the max quantity. The cart webpart and cart page itself would also have to modified. Calculations shouldn't have to change because the end-quantity would still just be multiplied by the base amount.

Can you give me guidance on this? I'm a very experienced developer so making the changes only worries me in the sense that it could snowball into a LOT of changes. Are there other things I'm overlooking? Other things to be concerned about?

Finally, could you please add this capability as a future enhancement?

Thank you,
Terry

If you go to edit product screen you will that there are options for minimum and maximum product quantity. You can set them accordingly to set the min/max bounds for quantity. Now as you are looking to convert the quantity control to dropdown then I would suggest you should better try to create modded version of quantity control that renders it in you way. Code for quantity control is available here
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=8542

So let's say if quantity for a product will be always multiple of 25 then you can set its minimum quantity to 25 for that product. Now when quantity control is rendered you can pick the product available in that context and create dropdown menu depending upon minimum value and creating different price items which will be multiple of minimum price up to the maximum possible value making the quantity control render as dropdown instead of textbox with arrows.


The advantages with this approach are
1)- There will be no major change to applicaton to upgrade would be easy.
2)- Fixing it in the quantity control will fix it accross the store.

Thank you Mazhar,

That will work for us. What we will do is not create the dropdown if a min quantity is specific but a max quantity is not specified because we would not normally have limits on those items. But if both a min and max quantity is specified then I'll modify the code to so a drop-down with the quantity increments. Thank you for pointing me to the quantity control code in the other thread.

I still would like to ask for this to be a future enhancement. It would be very simple to add and if you do some searching you will find a lot of sites that use this behavior.

Thanks again,
Terry

We have a feature request forum which we scan from time to time to pick the most requested features. If you would like to see something in AbleCommerce then you can post the request here
viewforum.php?f=45