Vendors who use our 3rd party cart parameters often wish for the product details to be displayed on our 2Checkout.com order page. By default, when using this parameter set, only the value of the cart_order_id parameter and the total of the sale are displayed on this page. Did you know it was possible for you to create the products in your vendor account, reference them with a few parameters, and still pass 2Checkout an arbitrary total value? The process is quite simple. We will start from the beginning and you are welcome to follow along by placing your Supplier ID number as the value for the sid parameter in our example links.

Let’s say that you are using the following link to sell your products or services to your customers:

https://www.2checkout.com/2co/buyer/purchase?sid=XXXXXXX&total=20.00&cart_order_id=1234ABCD 

When this link is processed, the value 1234ABCD is listed as the “Purchase Item” on our Order Details page. For our example, we are a vendor selling widgets at variable prices. Because of the variable price, you are not able to use our plug and play parameters, which require a set price for a product. If we want the customer to be able to see which widget they are purchasing but still offer the variable price we can do this. First, we need to create the widgets in our vendor account products area. To do this log into your account and click on link #4, “Set Up Products”. Next click on “New Product” link located on the right hand side of the screen. We will now enter all the required fields to describe our widget. The first required field is “Your Product ID”. You will have the ability to reference this product using this value. For this example, let’s enter the value “W1?. The Name field will be displayed on the Order Details page so for this example let’s enter the value “Widget Block” in this field. When you get to the “Price” field don’t panic because it is required, the system will not read this value when placing a sale and this is not what the customer will be charged. What I recommend, to prevent customers from attempting to purchase from the built in 2Checkout Order Page is to set this value to a high value as opposed to a low value such as 1.00. Let’s enter 1000.00 in this field for our example. The next required field is “Tangible”. If your product can be shipped then you will select YES and if your product is not something that is shipped you will select NO. Choosing either one will not affect the sales process at all in this example. Because our widgets will be shipped let’s choose YES. Now click the “Create Product” button to complete our widget.

Now that we have our product created, we can edit our purchase link to reference the product. This is done by using the parameters, id_type and c_prod, which are part of our New Cart Purchase Parameters. Id_type can hold a value of 1 if you wish to reference your product from the “Your Vendor ID” value which you entered when you created your product or a value of 2 if you wish to reference the product based on the “Product ID” which is assigned to your product by the 2Checkout system. Because the assigned product ID could be any number depending on your specific account, we will set the id_type parameter to the value of 1. Now that we have decided to use the “Your Product ID” value, we need to reference the product in our link using the c_prod parameter with the “Your Product ID” value, W1, as the value of the parameter. Adding these 2 parameters will cause our link to look like the following:

https://www.2checkout.com/2co/buyer/purchase?sid=XXXXXXX&total=20.00&cart_order_id=1234ABCD&id_type=1&c_prod=W1

When you process this link in your web browser you will see the “Purchase Item” of “1234ABCD” and Total of 20.00 just as we saw before. Below this information, we now see a section showing our Widget’s Product Name and a quantity, which defaults to 1. We have successfully displayed what product our customer purchased without actually using the product and price that was set in the 2Checkout account.

It is also very easy to add the quantity of the product purchased so the customer can see this as well. All you need to do is place a comma after your c_prod value and list the quantity value. For example if we sold 3 Widget Blocks to our customer, our link would look like the following:

https://www.2checkout.com/2co/buyer/purchase?sid=XXXXXXX&total=20.00&cart_order_id=1234ABCD&id_type=1&c_prod=W1,3

You can also use this method to list more then one product on the Order Details page. Let’s say we had created a Widget Cube in our account that we gave a ID of W2. The customer then purchases 2 of these widgets in addition to 3 Widget Blocks. Our link would now look like this:

https://www.2checkout.com/2co/buyer/purchase?sid=XXXXXXX&total=20.00&cart_order_id=1234ABCD&id_type=1&c_prod_1=W1,3&c_prod_2=W2,2

With closer inspection, you will see some changes in the parameters that we passed. If you pass in more then one c_prod parameter, you must place a underscore and then a digit after c_prod so our parameters are now c_prod_1 and c_prod_2. It is also important to point out that while we have 2 c_prod parameters we still are only required to pass in 1 id_type parameter. This parameter is applied to each c_prod value passed into the system.

After reading this article, you should be able to display product information to your customers on the 2Checkout Order Details page even if you are not using our Plug and Play Cart parameters.