AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

My store is running Ablecommerce Gold R10.

I need a way to require customers to purchase a mimimum quantity of items in a single category (can be made up of various products within that category as long as the TOTAL PURCHASED meets a certain minimum quantity).

Here's the wrinkle - I need this "minimum quantity" to be the number of boxes of a product multiplied by the number of units in each box.

The product is live crickets (yes, crickets!) for pet food (live food for reptiles).

We sell crickets in various sizes (1/16 inch, 1/8 inch, 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch, etc), and in various quantities per box (1,000 crickets per box, 2,000 crickets per box, 3,000 per box, etc).

I want to offer customers in a certain customer class (or Able "user group" such as "Wholesalers") special prices.

I don't want to use DISCOUNTS - I want the customers to see their actual price on each item without having to add an item to cart to see their group or quantity discount.

I plan to create a new Category ("Wholesale Crickets"), and create products with special prices within that category, and assign those products to only the Wholesalers group.

All seems easy so far with stock Able, BUT - I require that they buy a minimum of 5,000 total crickets per order. That means they can buy 1,000 1/16" crickets... + 2,000 1/4" crickets... + 2,000 1/2" crickets to make 5,000 crickets TOTAL, and all is good. But if the total number of crickets is LESS than 5,000, I want to prevent ability to checkout (and display a message "Minimum cricket quantity not met" or something).

SO... I need a way to multiply the number of products ("boxes" of crickets) x the number of "units" (crickets) in each box to get the total.

Any thoughts are appreciated!!

OH!... one more thing - this qty restriction does not apply to other products (which would be in other categories) - meaning they can still buy any number of other items and checkout just fine, as long as they don't have crickets in the cart that total less than 5,000.

I would love to find some way to do this with stock Ablecommerce & not have to have custom code, but so far I have not found it.

Any thought are much appreciated!!

Late response, but here's an answer in case others come looking:

There's no avoiding customization in this case. Your scenario is just too unique to work within the design of Able. It sounds like you've got the pricing issue covered, so you just need some sort of multiplier validation added to the product page. And then some minor validation on the checkout minimum as you described.

The challenge comes into having all of this only apply to certain products. You'll need some way to flag specific products as 'cricket minimum required' and then the logic must be updated to accommodate that flag. A product template field would make this simple, but programming code would still need to be written to check for the flag and handle the appropriate math involved.

Thanks for the response Joe!