Cart split for physical and digital products

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1

Hi team

We’re looking into the feasibility of implementing a cart split in our store, similar to what’s seen on Mercado Livre (Screenshot by Lightshot), to separate digital and physical products into distinct purchase sessions. We’d like to know if the platform supports the creation of two separate orderForms or, alternatively, two different carts.

We’re currently facing challenges when selling digital products alongside physical products. This is due to the incompatibility of the checkout processes for these product types in our current setup.

2

Hey @Yeisy!

First of all, thank you for bringing your topic to our community!

Let’s dive in… Registering digital products is set up the same way as a physical product, but with one key difference: the association of a specific “shipping strategy” for digital products.

So, the usual approach is to set up a specific strategy for “shipping” digital products, which includes:

  1. Registering a shipping policy (carrier)
  2. Registering a dock (linking your dock to the carrier/shipping policy and a trade policy)
  3. Registering a warehouse (linking the warehouse to a dock)

The big difference lies in how this strategy is configured. When registering a carrier, or shipping policy specifically for digital products, you’ll simply need to set it up to cover ZIP codes from 00000-000 to 99999-999 (if you want to cover delivery across the entire country), with a weight range from 00000 to 0.010 grams (these negligible values ensure this carrier will only handle digital products), and a zeroed-out shipping cost. To help with the “digital shipping” setup process, here’s a link so you can understand each field that needs to be filled in according to this scenario. That said, if it makes sense for the business strategy you want to adopt, you can also restrict the ZIP code range to a narrower coverage (with a specific ZIP code interval).

Additionally, I think it would be a good idea to prevent the zero-cost shipping option from appearing at checkout for customers visiting your store, since this is a digital product that doesn’t go through a traditional delivery process. Also, since VTEX treats it as a “normal” product registration, the emails that will be triggered will be standard platform emails, so your agency or some other external service will need to handle the delivery of this product. I imagine this would be a download link for the customer.

As for the Split options:

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If you register a dedicated Shipping Policy, a package split will occur. But if that solution doesn’t work for you, there’s also the option of registering physical products through a Seller Portal, which will generate an order split — however, with this option, physical products wouldn’t be able to be sent to Marketplaces, if that makes sense.

If you also want to send those products to Marketplaces, a possible workaround would be to have two digital products: one coming from the seller (for the order split) and one in the main account’s catalog (exclusively for integrations and without the flag to show in your store).

Do these solutions work for you? If not, could you give me more details about what incompatibilities you’ve been running into at checkout?

3

These are the main reasons why they cannot be purchased together with digital products (gift cards):

  • it cannot be canceled once the transactional email with the PIN code has been sent to the customer.
  • it only accepts payment via pix.
  • it does not require a delivery address.
  • and for tax reasons, the tax on physical products differs from the tax on services, which in this case gift cards are classified as.
4

@Yeisy got it!

With that in mind, I think the best option would be to use a Seller Portal for these products. I understand that these GiftCards won’t be sent to Marketplaces like Magazine Luiza, Carrefour, and others, correct?

By using the Seller Portal, you would centralize these orders there, and in the main account you can assign these products to a specific Trade Policy, which will allow for a differentiated payment condition for them. :thinking:

Note: I recommend reading the documentation below to understand drag cases.

This is because generating two orderforms would only be possible with a lot of customization of your checkout, which we don’t recommend as it can cause various issues at a crucial step in your customers’ shopping journey.

5

Important Note: If you choose this proposed solution, it’s always worth testing how the purchase flow and the orders themselves will work, so you can validate that everything is going as expected.

6

@KarinaMota today we are implementing the whitelabel seller in the store, can it be done using the whitelabel seller or would it still need to be the seller portal for the cart split?

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Hey @Yeisy, you can use a whitelabel, yes, but the order splitting will only happen if the orders come from different sellers. If you’re implementing whitelabel sellers of the franchise account type for a future regionalization, I believe the architecture proposed here won’t work. :slightly_frowning_face:

Could you give me a few more details about how your store’s architecture is set up in terms of Sellers, Whitelabel Sellers, and Franchise Accounts so I can give you a more accurate answer?

Karina Mota
Field Software Engineer | VTEX

8

Hi @KarinaMota
The idea of the WL seller with a franchise account is to use the multi DC, where we need to differentiate the inventory of products with delivery in São Paulo from the rest of the options, as well as not showing the seller selection to the user. So far we’ll only be implementing 2 WL sellers, and regionalization will happen in the cart when the zip code is entered.

9

How does the user experience look when splitting orders between digital gift cards and physical products using whitelabel sellers? Considering this architecture, how is this separation visible in the cart for the customer? I’d like to better understand the purchase flow, especially if the customer chooses to pay for the gift card (allocated to the ES seller) via PIX and the physical product (allocated to the SP seller) with a credit card. How does this setup impact shipping and payment selection at checkout, especially without exposing the seller choice to the user?

10

Hi @Yeisy, the user won’t see this order split — it will happen exclusively in your admin.

Unfortunately, there’s no option to choose two payment methods. Did you get a chance to read the documentation on commercial conditions that I sent earlier? The payment method will depend on the percentage each product represents in the customer’s cart.

Our checkout isn’t set up to handle two payment methods chosen for the same order. The only scenarios that come close to that and are possible on the VTEX platform are:

  • Payment with two cards (already natively available, no extra configuration needed);
  • Payment with a gift card + some other payment method.

Unfortunately, the PIX + Credit Card scenario is not achievable.