What is Simple Cart Item?

Simple Cart Item is an add-on product for Plone that allows items for sale to be added to a Plone website. Then site visitors can add items to their carts and, when they are ready, checkout using PayPal (in the future other payment gateways may be supported). More information about Simple Cart Item for Plone and the latest release of the product (and this documentation) can be found at the Simple Cart Item Plone Product page.

Purpose and Prerequisites

This how-to explains how a visitor to a website would go about using Simple Cart Items on that website to make purchases. This documentation assumes that the website being visited is a Plone site where Simple Cart Item version 0.5.0 was used to create a store.

How Site Visitors Can Use Simple Cart Item to Shop

1. An example Simple Cart Item page is shown below. Throughout this how-to images presented will involve a particular sample item for sale.

When a site visitor clicks the ADD TO CART button on the page of any Simple Cart Item, that item is added to the visitor's shopping cart and the visitor is taken to the shopping cart page.

2. At the shopping cart page, everything the visitor has added to his/her cart so far is shown. An example shopping cart page is shown below.

From this page, the visitor can delete items from the cart (by checking the delete box in the row of the item name and then using the delete button) or change quantities of items to be ordered (by editing the quantity field corresponding to a particular item and then clicking the update button).

3. If the visitor is at the shopping cart page but is not ready to check out yet, he or she can click the continue shopping button to be taken to the page he or she was at previously. When the visitor has items in his/her shopping cart, a box with a link to the shopping cart is shown in the left column of the website. This is what the box with the shopping cart link looks like when there are three items in the cart:

4. When the visitor is ready to purchase the selected items, he or she can click the checkout button from the shopping cart page. Then the visitor will be taken to PayPal, where he or she will be able to enter financial and delivery details and complete the purchase (this will credit the website's PayPal account).

5. If the visitor cancels the purchase once at PayPal, he/she will be taken to the website "Cancel Page" which has been set up by the website manager. If the visitor completes the purchase through PayPal, they will be taken to the "Thank You page". Once the purchase has been submitted through PayPal, the visitor and the website's PayPal account user will receive emails confirming and detailing the order.