quantity discounts and other quandries

[Alex Pukinskis]

Hi, all:

I'm trying to figure out how to implement a customer's products in
Shopsite. The existing page is here:

http://www.blankpads.com/pads/index.htm

I've figured out that I can simulate quantity discounts in Shopsite by:

1. Creating subproducts for each quantity of the
item(12,25,50,100,500,1000, etc).

2. Writing a custom product template that includes a quantity box.
Rather than going directly to the shopsite cart, the form will feed to a
cgi script that determines, based on quantity, what SKU to use, and then
posts the appropriate information to the cart.

The problem is, I can't figure out how to dynamically generate a
horizontal list of subproducts in tables, like you see on that page,
without constraining the merchant into a fixed set of quantities. If I
were using a regular programming language, it would be easy enough to
come up with the largest list of quantities on that page, generate the
table header dynamically, and then iterate through all of the
subproducts to display the prices for each product. This just seems
like an impossible task with the limitations of the Shopsite custom
template language. (Bet you guys never thought people would try stuff
like this when you were creating the custom template language!)

So should I just give up, and resign myself to a vertical list of
quantities for each product? It's not quite as elegant, and will take
up a lot more screen space, but it seems like it would work..

Also, has anyone come up with other clever workarounds for quantity
discounts? This works well for companies (like this one) that only have
a dozen or so products to discount, but I have another client with
hundreds of bumperstickers for which they want to offer quantity
discounts. They certainly don't want to manage thousands of subproducts
to do that...

Thank,

-Alex