Products require buyer input

[ptwd]

I'm building an online store to sell personalized digital products that require the buyer to share certain pieces of information about themselves. At bare minimum it could be done using a textarea input field, although for clarity it would be better to have a variety of input field types that gather the information.

The thing is: there can potentially be more than one product ordered, each using different information - in other words, I can't just add some extra fields to the checkout since different products may require some information that's different from the others. For example, I'll need the person's name, and for some products even two people's names. But if the buyer orders another product it might not use the same name(s) as the other products. So I need a way to collect specific information for each item ordered.

I was hoping I could do this using fields and field groups to gather the information that will go with the item being ordered, but it seems that the fields are meant to provide information TO the buyer, rather than the buyer inputting their information into the fields.

I'm hoping that Phoca has a way for me to create this kind of store and information input form. What is the best (and hopefully easiest) way that I could do that using Phoca cart and/or any of its extensions? At the moment I only have the central Phoca Cart installed.

Thank you!

[Jan]

Hi, you can add the text field or textarea field directly for each product as attribute, such value is then stored in order for each product.

Jan

[ptwd]

Thanks for your reply, Jan. Apologies for my delayed response. I'm unable to find much to guide me in setting up attributes. I'm seeing "predefined attributes" in the product setup, but nothing to indicate where or how to set those up. When I try to create some text fields in a product, the titles of the attributes show with the product, but I can't enter text. I'm unable to find any videos or documentation about this either. Can you please point me to where I can learn more about how to work with this feature? Many thanks.

[Nidzo]

[ptwd]

Thank you Nidzo!! That worked. The two text fields now show up as input fields and appear as part of the product in the checkout.

Next question: Is there a way I can create a group of these input fields so that I can just choose a group set from maybe the attributes template, so that I don't have to create each one manually for every product I have?

Also: Is there an extension that will allow me to change the layout of the fields, or do I have to do that myself using CSS? For example, to position the Firstname field to the left of the Lastname field, instead of stacked vertically.

[Nidzo]

1. Go to products list. Select products you wish to copy attributes to. Select Actions in top of page and choose Copy attributes. In popup window enter product in "Select a product from which the attributes will be copied" field and click Process.

2. Your need to use CSS.

[ptwd]

Thanks very much, Nidzo. That will definitely help. :)