I have been tasked with creating essentially a shopping cart system for the company that I work for. The problem is that the "products" have got such a complex combination of options that it would be completely impractical to try to use the shopping cart configuration options to have the user create them.
The company currently uses a web form that allows the user to choose all of the options in a single page. This includes multiple "products within the same page with the options (hence the complexity). But I thought, what if I took all of the options that were chosen by the user and created them in a "description" field as a large, formatted text entry. Then, based on their choices, I know the cost of the item, and I can assign a product ID to that particular transaction. I am hoping that I can then pass all of that information into nopCommerce's cart, so I can then take advantage of the user sign in, discount/coupon codes, payments etc.
So I guess what I am asking is:
1) From an external site, can I send a call to the nopCommerce store that will create the product, then add that product to the shopping cart and redirect to the shopping cart to complete the transaction?
2) Can I make that created product not visible to the public catalog.
If anyone has done this or can think or something that would be helpful I'd really appreciate it!
BTW I was able to get the add to cart functionality working using a plugin, so I'm good with that. I just need to be able to add the product, then I can redirect using that sku