Adding a Comments button to a shopping cart

Sparkle suggestion
#1

Maybe there’s already a way to do this that I just haven’t figured out.

I’m using Snipcart, and it’s working very well for me. I would like to offer users a free-form textbox for them to enter a name & registration number as part of the order.

Consider, when people order my product, I don’t know if they’re ordering it for themself or for someone else. I have to follow up every order with a note asking that question. Is there a way to include a Comments field in the order that they would fill out and it becomes part of the order form — or does this have to be a new request?

Chuck

#2

I haven’t used Snipcart, but I would imagine that it would have settings that you can add “fields”?

It would have to be something that needs to happen within Snipcart so the purchase is in sync with the name and registration fields.

So when someone makes a purchase do you receive an email of the purchase? I mean that email would have those details… the persons name and the order number?

#3

Yes, I receive an invoice from Snipcart that shows the information that is entered. It picks up the name of the purchaser and address from PayPal and the item and quantity and price and description come from the button on the website. But there’s no place for a freeform text field that I know of … no place where they can enter an ID number and the name of the person the service is for.

#4

Snipcart lends itself to a lot of coding. I’m over that nowadays so I tend to use more people-friendly shopping carts.

I went and had a quick look at the Snipcart website and it is still a functional mess (unusable)! That has been now at least 4-5 months… Not a good sign!

I managed to get access to their how to use Snipcart documents. Maybe this can help - Order comments – Snipcart Documentation

This is to do with the auto-email that goes out to the client post-purchase.
You can further communicate with your client via it. It could help or maybe not.

#5

I’d read that — I saw that custom fields can be defined. But wouldn’t that have to be done internally by Sparkle? I don’t want to try to hijack the Sparkle shopping cart.

#6

No, Snipcart is not Sparkle.
It is a third party shopping cart that is nicely pseudo integrated with Sparkle. What you do on the Snipcart end has nothing to do with Sparkle.

The best way to look at it is you have Snipcart embedded into Sparkle.

#7

I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point.

I use Sparkle to interact with Snipcart. Snipcart is a SAAS site that provides a shopping cart. Sparkle has an interface that enables you interact with Snipcart via the pages that Sparkle builds. I understand that I could build my own site and programmatically call Snipcart and pass a set of fields that I would define. And this leads back to the original suggestion. The fields that are available to me, as a Sparkle user, to pass to Snipcart are set by the Sparkle interface. I’m requesting that a comment field can be added to the interface, along with product number, unit price, and quantity, that can be passed to Snipcart and appear on the invoice.

#8

I understand your point, but isn’t the order description inside the checkout page? Usually it’s there as a ecommerce good practice.

Never used Snipcart (isn’t available here), so I could be wrong.

#9

I think I understand your question.

The item description is coded into the Purchase button on my form. So the customer is purchasing an entry into a tournament. The description tells me that this is an entry for 1 person into the July 1 tournament for $11. And from PayPal, I learn the name of the purchaser.

What I don’t have any way to learn from this transaction is whether the purchaser is registering himself or registering a son or daughter. And I also have to have the membership number of the competitor in order to complete the registration. So I always have to send a follow-up note, asking these questions, before I can complete my part of the transaction. Ideally, I’d be able to “create” a field (which I could label Player’s Name and ID number) and pass that as a field to Snipcart to appear on the Invoice.

#10

Oh okay, I went to read Snipcart’s documentation. I don’t think there is a order commentary option to send to Snipcart itself - it only possess a few options that it receives like name, image, description and some other few as stated here.. You can create a order custom field, but that is way over the objective or point of Sparkle I believe.

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You could probably go with Ecwid which let you create custom checkout field (sorry for the image on Portuguese)

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#11

That seems like the same conclusion that I had reached. Snipcart supports the creation of custom order fields. They have to be created by code. The coding for that custom field would probably have to be done by the Sparkle team. But, then, I don’t know how many of us are really using Snipcart to make it worth the team’s time to add and test a specialized feature like this.

#12

In the end I was going to suggest Ecwid as well for your needs as Matheus has suggested.
It is far more intuitive and allows for extra customised fields through the checkout process.

#13

Yep I get where you are coming from @chuckbo - totally makes sense.

But to clarify again Sparkle can only display what Snipcart allows.
What we have in Sparkle are smart-fields connected to already created functionality in Snipcart. For Duncan & Daniele to make happen what you are suggesting Snipcart has to have the ability first.

As you are aware you need first an account in Snipcart. If not then the Sparkle smart-fields won’t populate. So again the smart-fields are a reciprocals for what you have created and setup in Snipcart. Not the other way around.