Enter information into the order item information field

[txsomd]

I am developing an on-line dues payment site for a small non-profit organization. In order to keep costs down I wish to use ShopSite Starter. A lot of our dues payments are made by someone other than the member (parents, grandparents, etc) and a single payment can be for more than one member. I also need to validate the member information, which I am doing using a mysql database. My pages are written in php. If I can pass the member information into the order item information field everything will flow the way I want and I will be able to identify which members dues are being paid on each order. How can I do this with ShopSite Starter?

[loren_d_c]

In ShopSite Manager and Pro there is a Variable Price/Name/SKU feature that, if enabled for a product, would allow you to create order buttons that would pass custom values for one or all of those product attributes when the product is added to the cart. So you could pass a shopper's member info in the Name or SKU, for example. This feature is not in Starter.

In Starter you can enable a product's 'Customer Text Entry' option and pass your data in that field (add a parameter to the order button code in the format [identifier]:freeopt=[whatever], where [identifier] is replaced with the value of itemnum, sku, or guid depending on which you are using to add the product to the cart, and [whatever] is replaced with the text you want to pass into this field), but note that this text will display in an edit box in the cart so the shopper will be able to change it there. Unless you can figure out some way to disable editing of that box in the cart screen via CSS, but I can't help you with that.

-Loren

[txsomd]

Thanks for the reply. I used SKU rather than product.recordnumber and freeopt and textarea.
I am using ShopSite Order Anywhere. The value of the php variable $carttextarea comes from a mysql membership database. It carries through all the way to the Thank You Page. Exactly what I wanted.

Here is my actual working code.
<form method='post' name='cartitem3' action=http://shopsite.ipage.com/ss11.2/sc/order.cgi >
<input type=hidden name=SKUVALUE:freeopt value=1>
<input type=hidden name=storeid value=*mystorevalue
<input type=hidden name=dbname value=products>
<input type=hidden name=function value=add>
<input type=hidden name=sku value=SKUVALUE:>
<textarea name=1:freeopt >$carttextarea</textarea>
<br>
<input type=image src=http://mystore.com/store/media/add_to_cart.gif width=83 height=20 vspace=3 hspace=3 border=0 align=bottom alt=Add to Cart name=Add to Cart>
</form>");