Shopping Cart

Shopping Cart

Each visitor to the site has a shopping cart, available from the My Cart link in the top right of every page.

Product Area

At the top of the My Cart page is the product area, with a list of all products that the visitor has saved to her cart, the quantities and any custom options chosen. Each item's title, "Edit" text and thumbnail is a link back to the product's catalog page. It is possible to have multiple lines in the cart for a single product, that is, a customer may put an item in her cart more than once. This is especially important when buying items with custom options, for instance, two copies of the same book with different embossing.

Estimate Shipping and Tax

Before going to checkout, the customer can get an estimate of tax and shipping costs for any destination in the left panel.

U Country. Country drives the shipping and tax calculations. The list of valid countries can be edited in System | Configuration | General | Countries Options. Be extremely careful when adding countries to this list--you must Control-click (Windows) or Command-click (Macintosh) on additional countries or you will remove all of the countries previously selected. Also, previously selected countries may be removed by Control- or Command-clicking on their names.

T State/Province. This value drives the sales tax calculation, if "Connecticut" is chosen. This menu will only appear if the country chosen above requires a state or province in its addresses.

Z Zip/Postal code. This value drives the shipping calculation. This menu will only appear if the country chosen above requires a postal code in its addresses.

When the customer clicks on the "Get a Quote" button, Magento will connect to the shippers' websites, determine which shipping methods are available to the given country and postal code, and display the shipping costs. If the customer chooses a shipping method (radio button) and clicks on the "Update Total" button, the order summary in the right panel will be updated with the tax and shipping estimate.

Set up for shipping methods is complex. Options can be found in System | Configuration | Sales | Shipping Methods.

Discount Codes

M Discount codes can be used for promotions or for standard discounts. In particular we are using discount codes to implement the 10% member discount. Discount codes are managed in Promotions | Shopping Cart Price Rules. The rule is named and configured in the Rule Information tab. The display label is defined in the Labels tab. The discount calculation is defined in the Actions tab. Discount codes can be enabled for single or multiple use, and for limited or unlimited duration. Discount codes may also require that the customer has created an account and is logged in--the member discount works this way.

Summary

In the right panel there is a summary of the current state of the customer's order. This may change at checkout if the billing and shipping addresses differ from those used for the tax and shipping estimates. At the bottom of the summary is a button to checkout and a link to send the order to multiple ship-to addresses. (The multiple ship-to option may be disabled in System | Configuration | Sales | Shipping Settings | Options.)