Using the Shopping Cart
The Shopping Cart holds the offerings that you wish to order. You can add items to a cart from within the Offering Catalog, Self Service Center, and Cart Templates applications.
When you first log in to the Offering Catalog or Self Service Center, your shopping cart is empty. You can browse for or search for offerings that you wish to order, and click Add to Cart.
Clicking Add to Cart adds the selected offering to the cart and takes you to the Shopping Cart application, where you can view the current status of items in your cart. You can then click Continue Shopping to return to the Offering Catalog to add more items if desired.
You can create a cart template for a shopping cart when there is at least one offering in the shopping cart. This is useful if you want to create a cart template for offerings that you commonly need to order.
A shopping cart can not be submitted until all offerings in the cart are "valid". The cart item status indicator displays the status of each offering in the shopping cart: a green check mark indicates that the offering is valid; a red dash indicates that the offering contains at least one error. You can click on the offering in the shopping cart, open it and correct the data. Saving the changes will automatically update the status indicator for the offering in the cart.
By default users can have only one shopping cart active at a time. Administrators (users in the MAXADMIN security group), by default, can have multiple shopping carts active at one time. Administrators can grant access to other users either globally or for individual users to allow them to have multiple shopping carts active at one time.
To change the default for a particular user, from the Users application, choose and set the Cart Type to 'Single Cart' or 'Multiple Carts'. Multiple cart options are only available in Offering Catalog application and not in Self Service Center.
The following are examples of multiple cart usage:
- An administrative assistant works for multiple managers. The administrative assistant opens a shopping cart for Manager A to order a new laptop but finds she needs to know what operating system the Manager wants loaded on it, so she saves Manager A's shopping cart as a draft. In the meantime, Manager B wants her to order a service to fix the lights in his office. She clicks Start New Cart in the Offering Catalog application, orders the lighting maintenance service, and submits Manager B's shopping cart.
- You want to order two services, such as activating ports in your office and changing your telephone number. You select the Activate Ports service and enter some information. Then you find out you need to know the physical port numbers on the port plates in your office, and you don't have access to that information now. You save this shopping cart as a draft and click Start New Cart from the Offering Catalog application. You then order the service to change your telephone number, enter the information, and submit this shopping cart.
If you have multiple shopping carts open, clicking on Current Cart in Offering Catalog will take you to your most recent cart.
You can see the contents of your current cart by clicking My Shopping Cart from the Offering Catalog. If you have multiple carts, you can see all of your active carts by clicking All My Carts from the Offering Catalog. Selecting one of the carts automatically makes it the active cart.