Product Comparisons

[nsd999]

Hi gang,

I could be missing something, but I can't find a way to enable product comparisons (i.e., check the items you'd like to compare and specifications appear for each product in a nice, easy to read table.) I'm guessing it's not there..

In my opinion there seem to be a number of core e-commerce features not present in ShopSite such as product reviews, product comparison, product image magnification (mouseover enlarges image), product categories (I'd rather assign categories to pages, not individual items), tabbed more information pages, automatically populated best-seller lists, true bread-crumb navigation, etc. So far I do like ShopSite, but those features certainly would make my life easier and my sites quite a bit better..

Ok, sorry for the quick rant - back to comparisons..

I did notice this in the help:
"Creating a Multi-Product [Add to Cart] Button"

How difficult would it be to hack that into a product comparison module?

Best,
Joe

[Jim]

Product comparisons require dynamically generated pages because you have to choose which items to display and generate a new page to display the results. ShopSite generates static html pages, which is better for SEO but limits dynamic content like comparisons. The Search feature, however does dynamically gnerate pages. (All shopping cart, gift certificate, customer registration screes are also dynamic but they don't display products)
It is conceivable that you could use search to do comparisons of products. You would need to have page and product templates that had similar functionality to the Multi add to cart templates with check boxes for the products and a form that submits the selected products. You would use the checked items and a product field to do a search for those particular products. Probably sku would be the best to use since it would be unique for each product. You would probably need to use the advance search functionality where you can use AND, OR () etc, to construct a search query that would include all items. Then you would need a search results template that would display the products returned in a format that laid the data out side by side for easy comparison.
Note I have not tried this but it is theoretically possible to do.

Note about missing features: "product image magnification (mouseover enlarges image)" has been built into ShopSite for a number of versions (10sp1) and the ability to do it was there even before that using simple javascript.