Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

What to expect when your redesign goes live

At Y-Times we roll out new designs, redesigns and other major upgrades to Yahoo stores on a fairly regular basis. Some of the main questions our clients ask are how to prepare for a roll-out and what to expect in terms of SEO and conversions when the changes go live? For any functional Yahoo store how well the site ranks and how well it converts are probably the two most important metrics. Since pretty much ANY change you make to any page can potentially alter either or both of these metrics, merchants may understandably feel nervous about far reaching alterations to their sites. However, when those functionality and design changes and additions are done right, there is really very little to fear. First off, what does it mean for a design or redesign to be "done right?" From the technical stand point, search engines look at the underlying structure of your site (the HTML, and increasingly also the CSS and JavaScript code) to try to extract information and meaning from i

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins

Pre-Season Checkup

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching it's a good idea to do a general checkup on your store to be sure it's ready for prime time. Below are a few things you would want to check, along with a few add-ons that are not too major in scope, but which are often neglected and give you an edge over your competition. Can you Search and Order? Every time we do anything major in a store we test two things: whether searching and adding to cart/ordering works. You can have nice, flashy pictures, cool animation effects, a very quick loading site, anything, but if the store search is broken or you can't add to the cart or can't check out then an ecommerce site is worth nothing. Can you Order? Chances are if your checkout was completely broken you'd know about it by now, but it doesn't have to be totally broken in order to scare away potential customers. So go ahead, go to your site and first do a search and make sure it works. Then, add one or more products