One of my clients came to me with an idea that would enhance the usability of her store: she wanted her customers to be able to add items to the shopping cart with no page refresh, but it had to be ridiculously easy to use.

I had to make quite a few enhancements to the user experience; including:

1. Add to Cart button no longer created a page refresh
2. Add to Cart button triggered a JavaScript alert letting them know their item was added to the shopping cart
3. The header bar text (”My Cart: # Items”) had to be modified to show the overall number of items, and not the number of individual products within the shopping cart. For example, if the customer purchased two widgets and three doodles it had to display “My Cart: 5 items” instead of Zen Cart’s standard functionality that would have displayed “My Cart: 2 items”

The client has a trade-only web site so this functionality isn’t available to on the public-facing web site. Please email me and let me know if you would like to get my username and password for the demo store so you can see the functionality in action!