[thelist] Shopping Cart - Multiple Recipients...

[Rob Smith]

I built something like this a while ago for a pet project. Basically, a
shopper browses the site, puts all the stuff in the basket. The entire
store was comprised of drop ship vendors. It's safe to say that the
order was delivered to N many different business. At the time of
purchase, I took the order and split it back up to each of the
referenced vendors, stuck the new orders into an array, with different
transaction ids, and sent them on their merry way one at a time. I took
a piece of the pie from the order purchase, the vendor got the rest and
was left responsible to fulfill the order. (The project died due to lack
of promotional efforts...anyway I had 12 vendors signed up and it worked
once :-\ Not bad for a year of development).

You could do the same by allowing groups of products to be shipped to
multiple locations prior to purchase. At this point there would be
additional S&H per each location sent to due to shipping differences. 

You'd simply offer a drop down list, [One, Multiple] Destination(s).
When the Multiple is clicked, the user is directed to another screen
that will allow them to checkbox which line items go to destination 1.
They'd fill out the shipping address, save the changes, (system: process
shipping fees), and proceed back to the shopping cart. They'd repeat
this process until the shopping cart had 1 item left for the last
location. After all is completed, offer a confirmation page to show
Billing Address, Shipping address 1, line items, subtotal, shipping
handling subtotal, 2nd, 3rd, etc. and an all inclusive total shipping
fees and grand total of the order.

The relationship you're looking for is
                                                     
Customer -1----1- Shopping Cart -1----1- Order -1----N- Transaction ID
-1----1- Shipping locations

The key split from 1 order to 1 shipping location is accomplished by a
bridge table.

Good luck!


Rob Smith
LexJet
rob.smith at lexjet.com
http://www.lexjet.com
(800)453-9538
(941)330-1210 Int'l
(941)330-1220 Fax
1680 Fruitville Road, 3rd Floor
Sarasota, FL 34236