I've gone through the tutorial and understand 90% of what I need to do to get the cart functioning for my client (I have most of it implemented now) but I have a few niggling bits/questions that I need to ask about. Hopefully somebody can help me on here!

Firstly I am getting a little confused on shipping. My client wants to be able to set the shipping manually for each item (not on a sliding scale or a site-wide standard shipping rate) - how would I implement this? I can't seem to see anything on that in the tutorial or documentation and I'm completely stumped!

Secondly I have constructed a really simple two page shop - simply just a product list and a cart with checkout button on a separate page.
Is there any reason that CouchCart will not work if I do not have the "cart_modal" template on the site (as I won't be using it) and also do I still need to link the AJAX/Javascript? Everything seems to work fine as-is, but I'm worried about it randomly breaking when it goes live!

Apologies for the torrent of questions! New to this but starting to get the hang of most of it I think
-Ticalex

[KK]

Hi Ticalex,

My client wants to be able to set the shipping manually for each item (not on a sliding scale or a site-wide standard shipping rate) - how would I implement this?

As stated in the docs, shipping is something that is almost always unique to every business. The 'sliding-scale' you mentioned is just a generic sample implementation. If this does not work for you, we can always code up your custom calculation using a bit of PHP.

So, how exactly the shipping needs to be calculated in your case? I got that it is item-based but would it be a flat rate per item? e.g. if a product has $3 set as shipping and a customer buys 10 pieces of the product the shipping would come to 3*10=$30.

Please explain in detail.

Is there any reason that CouchCart will not work if I do not have the "cart_modal" template on the site (as I won't be using it) and also do I still need to link the AJAX/Javascript? Everything seems to work fine as-is, but I'm worried about it randomly breaking when it goes live!

Again, it is just a sample implementation. The only template truly essential for the cart to work is the cart template.

If you don't want the cart to show up in a modal window, don't use the modal template. Correspondingly, ditch the AJAX part as well if that is unnecessary.

Hope this helps.

On further talking with my client she has actually decided that she wants a flat rate per cart across the whole site now. Seems much more logical that way!

What I originally meant was to have an individual shipping charge applied to each item - so eg. item a has a flat charge of £3, item b has a flat charge of £2, and then the shipping is those two combined, so that would be £5 in that case. In hindsight it was actually not a very good idea at all!

It's lucky for me that the first time I've used this cart the implementation asked for has actually been the most simple one possible - it literally uses three pages (including the checkout.php file)!

Hopefully that should be it now with regards to the cart - aside from hooking it up to the client's paypal account it all seems to work OK

Thanks for the help! If I have any further questions I will ask them in this thread
Ticalex