RE: FN-FORUM drag and drop shopping cart

date posted 27th January 2003 15:00

> I've got a request for a shopping cart where you can say take
> a t-shirt, choose your colour, and then drag a logo onto it
> to see what it looks like, and also to find out the cost, as
> all logos differ.

I doubt very much that you'll find something with this functionality
built in.

However, it shouldn't be too difficult to build into something like
oscommerce.

Using your shopping cart of choice that supports variants of products,
have a picture of the product and a list of the logos. Then when the
user clicks on the logo or drags and drops it, use JS to change the src
of the image to one of that tshirt printed with that logo. If you use a
shopping cart that supports product variants, it should be able to take
care of the difference in price.

Drag and drop could be programmed using the onDrag and onDrop (?) events
in JavaScript, or else you could build a general purpose flash movie
that loads the data and images form the server so the same .swf could be
used for each page.

However, be aware that the drag and drop idea is a hurrendously bad for
useability on the web. People aren't used to drag and dropping, but are
very much used to clicking. I worked for a company pushing a technology
called Drag and Relate which was basically drag and drop on the web. It
was a nightmare when it came to usability, believe me.

Darran.