BTO Settings

In the ProductCart Control Panel navigation, click on “BTO > BTO Settings” to configure general settings that apply to all Build To Order Products sold on your store. Some of these settings can also be applied at the BTO Product level, overriding the general settings.

They are grouped in five areas:

• Display Settings: To control the look of the product configuration page (using radio buttons vs. drop-down menus).
• Inventory Settings: To specify whether general inventory settings for your store apply to Build To Order Products or not.
• Purchase Settings: To set whether BTO products can be purchased 'as is' or must be configured
• Quantity Discount settings: To set how to calculate quantity discounts for BTO products
• Quoting Settings: To turn on or off the ability for your customers to save their configured product/service as a quote that they can later print, edit, submit for review, and possibly turn into an order.

These settings change the way the configuration page and the “View Details” pop-up window are displayed. Note that you can style several areas of the BTO configuration pages by using dedicated styles in “pcStorefront.css” (This area needs to be expanded with more information on CSS).

• Don't show product image on configuration page
  Whether or not to display a product image for the BTO Product that the customer is configuring.
• Display choices using drop down menus or radio button
  Radio buttons are typically recommended when you don't have long lists of options in each category of selectable items. Drop-down menus work better if there are a lot of selectable options in each category.

• “View Details” link
  You can specify whether to use a text link or an image link. When you opt to use an image, ProductCart uses the More Details button that is being used for the store. The two examples above both use an image to link to the “View Details” page.
• “View Details” pop-up window
  The “View Details” link opens a pop-up window containing product information for the items available in that particular option menu. The link is only shown when selected by the administrator during the setup of a BTO Product. See Assigning Products and Items for more information. Here you can set the size of the window and whether or not product images should be shown. You can control the style of the window by using dedicated styles that are defined in the cascading style sheet document pcStorefront.css in the pc folder.

If AJAX is turned on in the storefront (General Settings > Store Settings > Miscellaneous), a simple mouse over any item name on the configuration page will provide customers with information on that item in a product preview window.

The difference with the “View Details” pop-up is that the product preview window is product-specific. The “View Details” pop-up provides information on all products in the category.

Related topic:

• Changing the look of the AJAX product preview's window

You can decide whether to have inventory settings apply to BTO Products or not.

If you select Yes, then the general inventory settings for your store, which you have configured under General Settings > Store Settings, will also apply to BTO Products. So if you are not allowing the sale of out of stock products and the BTO product is out of stock, it cannot be purchased.

This may not work well in a scenario in which you are selling both products and services on your store, you keep inventory on your products and do not want customers to be able to purchase out of stock items BUT need customers to be able to select, configure and purchase one of your services, for which there is no inventory.

Please note the following about the inventory levels of the items shown on a BTO configuration page.

• When an order is placed, inventory levels are adjusted both for the BTO product itself and for the Standard Products and BTO-Only Items included the configuration.
• When an item assigned to a BTO product is out of stock, the item is automatically hidden from the configuration page. This is true if:
  • The store is setup to not allow the sale of out of stock items
  • BTO products follow the store's general inventory settings
  • The BTO product itself is not setup to disregard inventory

When you create a BTO product, you can set up a default configuration for the product (e.g. a custom computer may come standard with a certain processor, memory, hard-disk type, etc.). Here you can define whether or not you want to prevent customers from purchasing the product or service “as is” (i.e. in its default configuration), forcing them to go through the configuration page.

• If you select Yes, the quantity field and the Add To Cart button will be removed from the product details page. Customers will have to customize the product before buying it.
• If you select No, a quantity field and an Add To Cart button are added to the product details page. Customers can either buy the product “as is” or customize it.

Here you can specify how quantity discounts should be calculated when applied to BTO products. You have two options:

• You can have ProductCart calculate quantity discounts on the configured price. When this option is selected, ProductCart uses the following formula to apply product quantity discounts to BTO products.

Unit Price = (Default Price + Selected Items’ Prices – Item Discounts)*(1-Quantity Discount Rate)

• Or you can have ProductCart calculate quantity discounts on the default price. In this scenario, quantity discounts are applied to the Build To Order product before the any customizations are selected by the customer. Note that ProductCart will use the Default Price (base price + default items’ prices), not the Base Price to perform the calculation. The formula in this case is:

Unit Price = (Default Price)*(1-Quantity Discount Rate) + Selected Items’ Prices – Item Discounts

Note that all of the above applies only when the discount is a percentage discount. When quantity discounts use an absolute amount (e.g. $15 per unit), the result is the same regardless of the option selected in this area. In that case, the formula is simply:

Unit Price = Default Price + Selected Items’ Prices – Item Discounts – Product Discount

This set of options allows you to enable and disable unique and powerful features of the Build To Order system. That is: the ability for your customers to save a current configuration (i.e. a “quote” or an “estimate”) so that it can be later printed in a printer-friendly format, edit it, submit it to the store, or turn it into an order.

Before being able to save a quote, customers that are not registered with your store, or that are not logged in, will be prompted to log in. After they log in, the information will be saved to their account. At any time, they can access their account, view & print previous quotes, reconfigure the product or service, and submit it as an order depending on the settings described below.

• Allow users to save a quote on a configured product
  When this feature is turned on, a Save Quote button is displayed on the product configuration page. Users can later view, print, edit and submit the quote as an order (if the Allow users to submit a quote option is checked). When saving a quote, customers are prompted to enter a discount code, if any. If a valid discount is entered, the amount is adjusted accordingly, and if the quote is later turned into an order, the discount information is carried through the checkout process.
• Allow users to submit a quote
  Quote is delivered to the store administrator via e-mail and can also be retrieved via the “Manage Quotes” menu.
• Disallow purchasing. Quote submission only
  When this option is selected, users cannot place an order for BTO products. They can only configure a BTO product, save the configuration to a quote, and print or submit the quote. This option is often used together with the Hide Prices feature described below. Note that this feature applies store-wide to all BTO products. If you would like to apply it to a specific BTO products, use the Add/Modify BTO Product page, discussed later in this chapter.

When customers are allowed to submit a quote, they do so in the storefront instead of adding a Build To Order product to the shopping cart. They configure the product and then click on “Save Quote”. The current product configuration is saved to their account as a “quote”. From there, they can edit the quote (i.e. change product configuration) and submit it to the store administrator for review.

The quote submission feature allows you to:

• Process an order offline for those customers that are not comfortable buying online, while still using ProductCart to have them specify exactly what they need, rather than taking the quote over the phone or via fax.
• Provide customers with an updated price for a product or service for which you are using the Hide Prices feature. This feature allows you not to show any prices for a particular product or service. For example, it applies to scenarios where prices fluctuate rapidly.

When a quote is submitted by a customer, an e-mail is automatically sent to the store administrator. At that time, the store administrator can log into the Control Panel and…

• View the product configuration details
• Fully edit it (including adding and removing items)
• View and change any prices (even when prices are turned off in the storefront)
• Finalize the quote (i.e. “approve” it) to allow the customer to turn it into an order. There is no “Place Order” button in the customer account area until a submitted quote has been finalized.