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Multi-Add and Yahoo Floating Cart Blues

Although the Yahoo! Floating Cart is considered pretty much bug free by Yahoo (you can look at the official open issues list here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/floatingcart/floatingcart-09.html) , there are some pretty "interesting" issues still, so since I keep running into them, I decided to post them here along with the work-arounds. The following issues all occur with multi-add forms only.

1) If you have your quantity set up as anything other than a simple text box (for example a drop-down SELECT box), the floating cart will not take the quantity value. It will take vwquantity as a customer-selected option. The workaround: use a text box instead. Nothing else works currently.

2) If you have a script that checks if the shopper made a selection from a drop-down (basically, any kind of an "onsubmit" handler), the floating cart will still receive the item, even if you cancel the submit event. The workaround: put the event handler on the click event of your add to cart button. This is of course not fool-proof, but this is the only way to prevent the adding of an item to the floating cart. Canceling the submit event does not work with the floating cart.

3) This may be the strangest, but you need to put the following hidden form fields right after the opening FORM tag of the order form, otherwise customer-selected options are not passed on to the floating cart:

multiple-add, allow-zero, vwcatalog, and vwitem0

Comments

And here is something new, or maybe not new but newly discovered: because the floating cart uses Flash to communicate, it apparently doesn't work on the iPad or iPhone...

Istvan
And another: as of this writing, the yahoo floating cart is not compatible with Internet Explorer 11. Which is a bummer since IE 11 is the most common version of IE around. The good news is that the broken floating cart functionality is not really visible to IE11 users. For them the cart works as if no floating cart was present.

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