shopping cart software

Some merchants may configure their online store to use the Multi-Child Add to Cart feature within their Volusion store front. This feature allows you to display a grid containing all variants of a product (AKA child products) on a single page - allowing customers to quickly select which product variant and quantity of the product they wish to purchase.

You can learn more about child products as well as configuring the Multi-Child Add to Cart feature in the Volusion online manual's Products chapter.

Ordering the Contents of the Multi-Child Add to Cart Grid:

By default, the child products listed in any Multi-Child Add to Cart grid will be listed in alphabetical order, based on the product name. For example, child products with the product name, "Polo Shirt - Green" will appear within the Multi-Child Add to Cart grid before the product named, "Polo Shirt - Red".

There is no specific function in the Volusion store that will allow you to specify the order of child products as they will appear within the Multi-Child Add to Cart grid. However, there is a techinique that will allow you to modify the product names to display them in any order you wish.

Modifying Child Product Names:

This technique involves adding a brief, HTML comment at the beginning of each product name. You can do this by editing the Product Name field within each product's settings page.

In this case, you will be adding an HTML comment, containing a numeric value. The Multi-Child Add to Cart grid will order each child product alphabetically or numerically based on all of the characters it detects in the Product Name field - even characters that will not be visible by customers browsing the actual product page within the store front. You can add <!010>, <!020>, <!030>, etc. to the beginning of each child product's name to force the Volusion store to display the products in the order you wish.

Example

In this example, you have 5 child products being displayed in a Multi-Child Add to Cart grid such as follows:

Say you wish to display the products listed above with Red Shirt first, followed by blue, yellow, green and then purple? To do this, you can add <!010>, <!020>, <!030>, etc. to each product code in order to re-arrange the child products into this order. Note that these groups of characters, while readable by the Volusion store will be treated as HTML comments when rendered to visitors' web browsers and will not be displayed on your store front.

Continuing with the example, after modifying the child products' Product Name fields as described above, the afrorementioned table will contain the following and in the following order:

Note once again that the characters, including the opening and closing brackets will not be displayed in the Multi-Child Add to Cart grid, nor anywhere else in your online store front.