A store selling mealworms wants buyers to select a wildlife rehabilitation center on the product page, with the choice determining the recipient, and to avoid collecting a shipping address at checkout. Current reliance on checkout notes is seen as error-prone and hard to scale.
Proposed approaches:
Product variants: Add each center as a variant with pricing; would require theme customization and likely a developer, but risks hitting Shopify’s 100-variant limit as centers grow.
Line item properties: Add a custom field to each product to capture the selected center, avoiding the variant limit. A UI Elements Generator can create the form code to insert into the product form; backing up the theme is recommended.
Cart attributes: For a single selection that applies to the entire order, use order-level attributes instead of cart notes.
Alternative: Split products by center or quantity, but this is hard to manage at scale, complicates UX, and may need backend inventory syncing.
Latest update: The store owner plans to contact a developer for a custom, scalable solution. The discussion remains open; how to omit shipping address at checkout was not addressed.
Hello everybody! I am looking for a solution to a unique problem I’m facing:
We sell mealworms and are setting up to have customers choose which of the wildlife rehabilitation centers in our network will receive their one-time or subscription order. At this time customers will tell us which wildlife rehab they want to support in the Notes section during checkout. That will be pretty clunky and prone to miscommunication, I predict. I’d love to have the option for supporters to select from a list of available centers on the product page. Then during check out they simply add their billing address and payment info, but not shipping address.
How wildly complicated would this be to set up? Would I need to hire someone? Thanks!
Hi @Brynomite If you need the customization I describe below contact me with details, contact info in my sig.
You’ll probably want to do this using Line Item Properties since using variant options you’ll quickly hit the 100 variant limit for product as the number of centers increases.
The code it generates then needs to be put into the product form of the given theme.
Also note there are cart attributes so if you want them to make a singular selection once for the entire order you’d want to use that instead of the cart note which is prone to being ignored by customers. https://ui-elements-generator.myshopify.com/pages/cart-attribute
An alternative to get around the 100 variant limit is to split up products based on one of the options such as the center, so instead of /wrpn-mealworms-gift is would be /wrpn-mealworms-gift-for-mssissippi or by quantity /wrpn-mealworms-gift-250. That however can quickly become clunky to manage without backend investment to sync inventory, and considering the UX of how to make sure customers get to the right product page etc etc etc etc.
This is super helpful information, @PaulNewton . Since we hope to have quite a few centers sign up over the next few years, I hope to be able to develop a system that grows well. I will probably be contacting you by EOD about a custom solution, pricing, etc. Thank you!
