Hi
I have downloaded Shoppng cart to demo. Great product and would buy it however having produced a questionaire for our members re suitability ~I find a key feature is missing for our club. Many of our members still do not trust on line credit transactions and prefer to pay by cheque (check to you guys over the pond!!!). Include that feature and you have a customer

The whole idea of the shopping cart is that you pay online.

This would be my suggestion.
I you want your clients to pay by cheque you do not need a shopping cart. Just build a website with producti images and codes and have anyone who want to buy your product send you an email with the product code and letting you know they are sending you a cheque.

Finally a voice of reason! I, for one, can't understand someone shopping online for the convenience and then turning around and wanting to write a check, spend money on postage to send it, and then have to wait for a check to clear before their order gets sent. For those of you who don't need payment right away, then you don't need a cart either. Take add99wd's suggestion, it will save you time, and money spent on a cart you don't need.

Convince a 72 year old man to complete a transaction online. My Father will browse online (slowly) find all sorts of neat things and order them... but not online. He'll print out the shopping cart, call, talk to someone and order over the phone. He'll write a check and mail it before using a credit card. He doesn't trust all that stuff he doesn't understand.

As a vendor, if that's too much trouble for you that's fine, you don't need it and you're not missing anything.

As for me... I want every sell I can get. If they want to print out the order and mail it to me with a check and when the check clears ship the bat house... I'm there. It would be a big bonus if they could complete the order online (so I'd know about it) and then print and mail.

OR... I've had people create an order online then call to come pickup with cash. The online order part is not a requirement, but it does make the process much smoother.

I understand this doesn't appeal to everyone but don't slam something just because you don't understand it. The need is real but the value to the users is highly variable.

Creating an online form to submit your order is a valid option, but it splits the system and unless you want to maintain 2 inventories, they have no way to shop and create the list of what they want.

I'm going to use the shopping cart... but if a "Print this order and call/mail/pickup" was an option... I'd use it.

FYI, They can print out the order on the cart and send it to you. Or they could print to file and email it to you.

I think the only point was that you don't need the cart at all if there is no money being exchanged in the cart, not that what you want to do isn't valid. Any ideas that are exchanged in a forum are meant to help. If you don't like the suggestions someone gives to you, you don't have to use it, it's up to you. But you don't need to bash the people that try and help with their ideas, otherwise eventually no one will want to share their ideas for fear of being ridiculed.

add99wd gave a very good suggestion to try and help since there is currently no way to effectively complete the transaction without accepting payment. And who knows if there ever will be. So if you want to use the cart in that way you need a work-around that will get the job done.

I think you read me wrong, I wasn't "bashing" anyone. While it was a good idea (and I even agreed it was a valid idea) the point I was addressing was your statement

"I, for one, can't understand someone shopping online for the convenience and then turning around and wanting to write a check, spend money on postage to send it, and then have to wait for a check to clear before their order gets sent."

I hope you can understand now and as such maybe the idea of an integrated printable order in the shopping cart might not seem so strange to you.

If you construed my post as "bashing" excuse me but that was not the intent.

Robert,

The idea is not strange to me, I was simply agreeing with the earlier statement about shopping carts being designed to take payment to finish the transaction. The entire idea behind a shopping cart is for the transaction to be completed in the cart. If you don't need the payment you don't need the cart. If you plan on taking payment most of the time in the cart, then for those occasional sales where someone wants to pay by check just instruct them to print the page and send it to you. I noted a couple of ways you can make the sale without payment. If the transaction is going to be completed off site then there is no reason to complete the sale in the cart. So in effect there is already a way to make the sale without immediate payment. As you noted already, you can also set up a form on your main website for them to send you the order. They would simply cut and paste the order form in the cart into the form you have made for them to send to you.
I am sure CC is going to address this at some point since a lot of customers would like it so badly, but it probably isn't on their radar yet with all the other features being requested. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard for them to accomplish. On the other hand maybe they will have to rewrite thousands of lines of code to get it to work properly. Since I am no programmer I have no idea.

I agree with you 100% . The online experience is for everyone to enjoy. In addition, a customer needs to have available to them every option possible within reason to purchase an item, and that includes money orders and checks. After all, this whole thing is about getting paid for your products or service right? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I've been at this game for sometime. I'm a software developer. I work and have worked among many. There is a tendency these days for programmers to write software that's convenient for them to write without considering the end user or customer who has to use the doggon' thing first! Just like this whole deal about the customer having to create a Paypal account to purchase and item, rediculous. This is all about placing the programmer and the merchant before the customer. So the customer experiences this and says, "I'll purchase somewhere else." Can we really afford to do this? It's bad business.

Geeez, nothing like beating a dead horse. I think CC gets the idea that there are customers of theirs that would like this feature already. They're working on new features all the time. Some are more important(such as the legal aspect of taxes)than others. Good things come when you are patient. There are some things I would like yesterday also, like a robust shipping module, but they can't do it all overnight. And constantly harping on it won't bring it any faster.