Need basic shopping cart w/paypal & shipping

cgchris99

I have a very simple page that has 4 items for sale. They want to use paypal as the processor. I have this working just fine but here is the problem.

They want actual UPS shipping calulated. Since their is no actual cart on my side (all passed to paypal) I don't know the total weight or how to calculate the actual UPS shipping.

I didn't create a shopping cart just the links to add the items to the paypal cart.
Of course I can view the Paypal shopping cart with all the items but I don't know how to get the total weight of the items or how to get the info from UPS once I get it.

I don't need a full blown ecommerce solution like oscommerce. As I said their are 4 items for sale. I don't know how to store my own shopping cart via PHP. And I don't know where to find a PHP script to calculate the UPS shipping cost.

Thanks for any help

Foo

If you've only got 4 items and that's not likely to expand much then you can implement what you want with javascript.

You'll have to obtain the correct weight pricing information first (no code can magically do this for you that I know of), then code a little javascript into the HTML which checks which items have been selected, adds their delivery prices/weights together, then tells the user.

PHP is not appropriate in this case.

cgchris99

Since I have to create a pseudo shopping cart or at least an array to hold the items, prices and weights, can you point me in the right direction on how to do this with php?

Foo

Um, okay.
Assuming you have all 4 items on the same page, then you would need to do the following:

Create a HTML form around all 4 items.
Have a hidden field for each item which listed the weight/carriage price of the item
Have the form submit to a PHP page which read in all the form values using the $POST or $GET arrays.
Use these values to determine the carriage cost of the items
Echo the result of this calculation back to the screen.

Something like this:


$Item1Weight = $_GET['Item1Weight'];
$Item2Weight = $_GET['Item2Weight'];
$Item3Weight = $_GET['Item3Weight'];
$Item4Weight = $_GET['Item4Weight'];

$TotalWeight = $Item1Weight + $Item2Weight + $Item3Weight + $Item4Weight;

$TotalPrice = $TotalWeight * 2.575 //Just a rough example of how to convert the weight into a cost

Print "Your Total Order will cost an extra $TotalPrice in shipping costs";

anothersteve

suggestion from my mail order experience: modify the business rules. Have them take the weight for each item shipped to the average distance zone away from them so that people closer in actually pay a little more, and further away get a bargain. Call it shipping and handling so the difference is justifiable. Another good customer service add on is to offer next day shipping at a premium. On the order form add it as an option box check, show the breakdown on the acknowledgement page you print back to the web customer to print out for detail, and pass the total to the Paypal input.
Hope this helps

cgchris99

Modifing the business rules may work for some but there is a big difference in shipping weights.

For example, if they order a 2pack, it weighs about .75 pounds. However, if they order a 200 pack it would be quite expensive to ship at 75lbs.

The basic paypal shopping cart works for most of this application. This is the frustrating part. By using the paypal cart I can put multiple items in the shopping cart. However, since the code for the cart is on paypal, my side of the site doesn't know whats in the shopping cart. This means I cannot tell what the weights are.

This is a very simple store and really doesn't need all the bells and whistles of a full catalog/ecommerce solution.

It appears that I do need to code my own shopping cart and then somehow pass that information to paypal. I know how to pass a single item to paypal but how do I pass my entire shopping cart?

This should have been a simple application but due to the customers request for quoted UPS shipping and Quantity discounts, it quickly is becoming a Pain in the butt.

anothersteve

how about a table that calculates it all, but again using an average for distances. That way they can take the item, apply a discount for quantity, and add the S&H based on quantity. Show the customer one total and pass that into paypal?
If tax gets involved then it can be a nightmare.
btw: I thought I saw on sourceforge.net a php shopping cart someone wrote.
good luck.