Do you ever need to charge an extra fee to your customer’s credit card, or someone needs to place a custom order for something that isn’t available on your site?  It’s easy to process that payment online through your store using ShopSite’s Variable Price feature.  In this post we’ll show an example of how that feature can be used to create a product for Special Orders.

The Variable Fields

The first step is to add a new product and enable the Variable Price field.  In our sample we’ve also enabled Variable Name so we can have the customer enter a short note which will show as the product name, and we’ve set the Price to $0.00 to allow any variable price to be entered:

Variable Price & Name

ShopSite’s documentation has additional details on the variable fields:

http://www.shopsite.com/help/12.0/en-US/sc/pro/edit.product.info.html

The Field Labels

ShopSite allows you to change the labels for the variable fields on the Preferences > Store Text > Store Pages screen.  We’ve updated ours to use “Payment For” and “Amount Due” for the product name and price:

Variable Field Labels

Note: Different versions of ShopSite may have different fields available or may use them differently in the templates.  In our sample and the screenshot above we are using ShopSite Pro v12 SP1.

The Template

What you use for your product template will determine how the field labels appear and in some cases the variable fields may not even appear if you have a custom template that does not support them.

In our sample we’re using this block of code to display the name and price fields on the product’s More Information page:

[-- IF PRODUCT.VariableName? --]<span class="var-name"><b>[-- STORE.VP_CompanyName --]:</b> <input name="[--PRODUCT.RecordNumber--]:name" size="20" value="" type="text"></span>[-- END_IF --]
[-- IF PRODUCT.VariablePrice? --]<span class="var-price"><b>[-- STORE.VP_InvoiceAmount --]:</b> [-- STORE.CurrencySymbol --]<input name="[--PRODUCT.RecordNumber--]:price" size="4" value="" type="text"></span>[-- END_IF --]

This will display input fields for both the product name and price, with the corresponding text fields that we updated in the step above.  Feel free to change anything in the code, and you can always hard-code any labels you want to use instead of using the template tags.

The Sample

Now its time to see our work in action – here’s a sample from our demo store:

http://shopsite-demo.lexiconn.com/special-order.html

Now we can have the customer submit a custom payment at anytime.   We could ask them to enter “Upgrade order 1234 to 2nd Day” in the “Payment For” field and enter in $13 for the price.  Or maybe they need to change a product, so we ask them to enter “Change order 4321 to a Blue Wagon” and to enter $7 for the price.

We can easily have the customer submit an extra payment, and that payment is fully tracked in ShopSite as well as sending confirmation emails just like any other order.