I just finished programming this for myself. It is a feature we have wanted for quite some time now.

https://www.suspension.com/sharecart.asp

If you add anything to the cart, you can use that page to send a link to that cart to someone else. We plan to use this in responding to customer emails and live chats. It should allow us to give them a pre-filled cart to complete the purchase by themselves.

Feedback is certainly welcome Vince.

- Graham Slaughter

Hi Graham
It looks good to me and I gave it a kick around from the point of view of security and can't seem to find any problems. It will be interesting to know if after a few weeks it gets a lot of use as if so it may be worth incorporating something similar into the main cart.

Vince

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I haven't been able to produce any issues with it. Even taking a cart that has already been completed appears to not cause issues.

I'll get our customer service guys to give some feedback on how we use it and post it here.

From our customer service team:
"First, let me say that the whole team loves it. It has proven to be most successful during our live chat interactions. The ease of use when chatting with a customer and being able to build the cart for them is super beneficial. We can also add the cart link in our follow up emails when a chat has ended. This allows us to put one more email in front of the customer so we are still on top of mind and it has the added benefit of them not having to add anything to a cart. We are still learning when is the right time in our conversations to send them the cart link. However, now that we have this feature it's hard to see how we could do business without it. We are still learning and training the team to utilize this tool effectively."

Hi Graham, we have done something similar in the page with the customer login.
We have them create an account if they haven't, then we use the login from the admin feature to build a cart or make changes to their cart.
Then the customer can login and take it from there.

I am curious as to how your feature is different than that process, other than the customer having to create/login to their cart.

Hi Dave,

That is what we used to do. The biggest difference is there is now no need to walk the customer through creating an account, or logging into an account. It just works. Immediately.

If a customer is in livechat we can share the cart with them just by swapping a link with them in the chat. 5 seconds and we are in the same cart together while we chat.
If a customer is on the phone we can just email them a link and then we can look at the cart together. We can even take their order over the phone like we usually do with the added benefit of having the customer sign off on the order before we process it.
Have a customer that sent an email asking what to purchase? Send them an email with the product in the cart. A single link puts them into the cart with the product they asked about, ready to buy.

It removes barriers to purchase and speeds movement towards purchase dramatically.

It makes things fast, simple, and accurate.

- Graham Slaughter

Hi Graham, thanks for the additional info. I does sound interesting.

This is an excellent idea, especially for businesses who sell technically complex products that customers sometimes have problems selecting. Nice one Graham.

I would like to see this functionality added to the cart.

Regards

Mike

Using ECT since 2003.

Yes, this seems like a really good idea, Graham and I'm trying some things out now to implement this in the cart. I'm thinking of making this for logged in customers only, and maybe to have the option so that only a given login level would see the button to expose the cart. The way I'm thinking is that if this is primarily for staff to use to create carts for customers then they are going to have a login available and it can help to improve security if it's not possible to copy just anyone's cart. Comments welcome etc.

Vince

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Making customers create an account and login would defeat the purpose. Technically, we can already do that. (That is what Dave is doing)

The benefit of it is the immediate no-nonsense functionality. Want to share a cart? Click a link and copy the cart ID to the customer support folks. Done, you're sharing the cart. We hide the link in the design at the bottom of the cart page. It isn't obvious and it certainly isn't a call to action. It IS however SUPER simple to just direct folks to click that if they're on livechat or the phone.

See it hiding at the very bottom? That's a link that takes you to this page: https://www.suspension.com/sharecart.asp

Hi Graham
What I mean is that whoever creates the cart has to have an account, and this would be your staff who are doing the creation. But you don't have to have an account to be able to use the URL to copy the cart and this will be your customer. Does that seem ok? Apart from the security angle it also means your customer don't see yet another button on the cart page.

Vince

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I see what you mean. Technically, everyone already creates an account just by adding something to their cart, but you're saying that the ability to see that page (the sharecart page as an example) would be limited to logged in folks. I can see why that would be a good idea.

From a security standpoint, that's probably ideal - but the likelihood of someone using that page to screw with things seems pretty remote considering the complexity of the cart IDs. Still, it would probably be best practice to restrict pages from people that don't need them.

Hi Graham
I've got something ready now. Are you able to give it a kick around to make sure it works how you think it should or have any other ideas?

Vince

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I can certainly take a look at it. We're at least 1 version back though as we have so much custom work done to our cart

Hi Graham
I've sent you the changes and if you get a chance to have a look that would be great. If not, no worries. You have to give the login of your staff the "Share Carts" attribute in the customer login admin page. It's not on the Quick Entry (as I guess this will only be added to a few staff logins) so you have to go into the login details page to set it (in the same way as tax exempt etc).

Vince

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Graham, you could just create a clone of your vsadmin and drop the new files Vince provides in there, just with your db_conn_open file.

Vince, if you want to send it to me I can try it out on my dev site.

One thing I forgot to mention guys . . . when you press the "Share Cart" button, the URL is automatically copied to the clipboard. You don't need to do a <Ctrl>+C or anything like that to copy.

Vince

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Awesome, I'll check it out next week. We got hit bad with hail, so I'll be a bit busy with other things until I can get that sorted out

- Graham Slaughter

FYI Graham, I did text it out on my dev site and it seems to work really well.

David