On these pages, the designers want to test as many as 5 different presentations of the product. The only common elements of the product buy they need are the price, quantity, attributs and the actual add_to_cart button.

Does this make sense?

i wish the UC guys would enable quotes on these forums! Add an input filter

OK so let me put it back to you in my own verbiage. I think what you're saying is this. You've got your normal product node and it is going to be somewhat confined to the fields that define that product. You can REtheme it but it's still going to look like the basic product node. And you still only have ONE VIEW into the product.

What you want to do is somehow get the ability to "multi theme" it. In essence, be able to present (theme) a single product in multiple ways. Yes?

This allows you to create ad copy content "around" what used to be a very static and singular product node. Then you present these multiple product views with different "looks", in different "combinations" and probably in different menu paths or page locations (say on the front page) to entice a customer without having to go to the "dreaded" and "limited" product view. Yes?

It sort of is a webommercial isn't it? You're really creating ads for uc products. Depending on how you write the content you can disguise the product aspect of it as much as you want. Very Cool.

I always imagined doing that by just writing ad copy like you describe and then inserting a link to a product which would take you to the product view. Your method elminates the extra 2 clicks to go to the product page and then click the add to cart button.

Qs:

- Maybe it's because i don't do a lot of ecommerce shopping and when i do, i'm pretty specific about what i want. But do people in the real world actually just click to "quick" purchase stuff like this off of an ad? I just naturally assume i want to look at the product view. Get the facts and make sure i know what i'm getting before i pull the trigger. I get the feeling your ads are not that really disguised though and by the time you get through the infomercial part, the product part looks convincing enough to add to the cart.

do you have an example of what you're talking about online somewhere?

- when someone clicks add to cart embedded in these ads, do they stay on the ad or do they go to the cart? i have to look at how all of these forms are working underneath the scenes some day.

i don't believe that is ajax but normally when you submit a form, you're routed to a different menupath/uri. the fact that you are embedding form code in a totally unrelated node with a different menu path would lead me to believe the same thing happens.

- How do you handle the ad creation? Are they hard coded nodes, do you create a custom module to generate the ad pages or do you use custom blocks?

- How do you determine the placement of the ads? Do you manually assign them to blocks or are you using some kind of auto rotate / auto placement code based on a set of criteria?

- How do you track the effectiveness of the ad? As you said, i'm assuming you have 5 ads for a given product, how do you determine which one is giving you the best results or do you not have anything in place?

thanks. i appreciate the insights.