ShopSite has some excellent tips and tricks on their website in the Designer’s Cookbook, and today we want to highlight one of those for you since it’s very useful for obtaining product options from a customer when the usual drop-down boxes that product options use are not appropriate.

Text Entry Ordering Options

While ShopSite’s Ordering Options feature is extremely powerful, especially after Advanced Options were made available, there may still be a time when you want to provide the customer with a text field instead of the usual method of a drop-down select box.  ShopSite has an article on their tips page with 2 options as well as all the template code and details for how to implement this method:

Divided Customer Text Entry Fields
http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/product16-textentryfielddivided.shtml

The first option makes use of a product’s custom text entry field (Products > Edit Product Info) and works in all versions of ShopSite, while the second option makes use of Ordering Options but uses custom code to fill in the values and will only work in ShopSite Pro.

When Would You Use This?

Since you may any number of fields on your page there are a variety of possibilities:

• If  a product celebrates a birthday or anniversary, you can prompt for a name and date to customize the item.
• A trophy could have fields prompting for the winner’s name and the title of the award.
• An embroidered product could prompt for multiple lines of text for customization.

…

If you’re unable to provide your customer with the customization options you need with Ordering Options, you may want to give this method a try – the possibilities are endless!

Further reading & reference:

Divided Customer Entry Fields (The article we’re referencing here)
http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/product16-textentryfielddivided.shtml

Custom Template Cookbook
http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/

Advanced Template Tips
http://www.shopsite.com/templates/cookbook/main-tips.shtml