Pwear

I'm building a new website with which I'll be selling designs on a varied selection of products. Each design will be available on up to 6 different products, and I'd like an easy way to represent this on the website.

I love the cafepress layout in which you can click on a design and are taken to a page with a list of products that the image can be applied to. It's easy to shop, easy to select products and is easily organized visually.

Problem is, I need to figure out a way to set up a shopping cart like this for my own site. I can have a static page for each design that lists every product type, and in which each image will link to the appropriate product page, but I have over 100 designs and that would mean making a separate static page for each one.

I've been using cubecart for years and it's great, but for this type of site where multiple products have the same image, I just can't see an easy way to represent that for the customer easily. I can make a category page for each product, then code the category pages to display that design from each product type, but that's getting really involved and would involve some serious custom coding on the cart, which I'd like to avoid.

Any solutions out there?

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Rodney

Quote: I've been using cubecart for years and it's great, but for this type of site where multiple products have the same image, I just can't see an easy way to represent that for the customer easily. I can make a category page for each product, then code the category pages to display that design from each product type, but that's getting really involved and would involve some serious custom coding on the cart, which I'd like to avoid.

It seems like CubeCart could do this pretty easily.

Just organize the site layout by putting each "category" as a design. So when someone clicks on the design on the front page, they can then see several products with that design in that category.

So if one design is "fishstick lover", you'd create a category called "fishstick lover" with a big image of the design to represent the category.

Then add a picture of that design to the top of that category template so it shows when people are browsing that category.

Then add the products (t-shirts, hoodies, ladies tees) with that design on it into that category.

I don't think any shopping cart lays it out like CafePress by default. It's just a design choice that's made by CafePress when they setup the site. In their premium shops you can decide to setup your shop by design or by a more traditional category like "kids t-shirts" "women's t-shirts"

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Pwear

Hey thanks - I actually thought of making each design a category right after I posted that, but wasn't convinced until I saw that you thought of it too. It's counter-intuitive because categories are usually product types, but that's a great way to arrange products by designs rather than by types.

Also, I can add additional categories like "t-shirts", "mugs", etc. and place each product type/design in these categories as well, so people can browse by those categories as well as just by design (for example, if they want to browse only t-shirts).

If I do that I'm going to have to just use a custom html "products" menu so people can still browse by product type if they want to, because if I use the cubecart php function to call the menu it'll list every design as a product in the menu - I don't think there's a way to selectively display categories in the menu. That's not a huge deal though.

Thanks for the help, I'll give it a try!

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Pwear

Thanks again Rodney, I set it up as you suggested and it's a perfect layout. I made a category for each design, which contains all products of that design, and I also added each product to their own type category (t-shirts, mugs, sweatshirts, etc.) so people can browse that way too. I'm going to install a mod to hide all of the design categories (there's close to 100 of them) and just have the designs on the front page for browsing. People will also be able to search for keywords in the designs using the built-in search feature.

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jordanmichael2

Very interesting thread about selling T-shirts via ecommerce platform.

 

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