One account, multiple users, multiple shopping cart in a web application

Question

I received a somewhat unusual request (imo) for a transactional web site.

I have to implement the possibility of having multiple shopping cart for the same user. Those really are shopping carts, not order templates.

I.E: A store with several departments ordering under the same account, but with a different person placing orders for a specific department only.

Having more than one user per account is not an option since it would involve 'too much' management from the stores owner and the admins.

Anyone had to deal with this before? The option so far is to have names for shopping cart, and a dropdown list or something alike after login to choose the cart with some kind of 'busy flag' to lock the cart if it's in use in another session.

Answer 1

This is indeed a strange request. It would make much more sense if all the different departments used separate accounts, which belonged to some common group for the org. Anyhow, for this case something along the lines of what you described is probably fine. You could have a single shopping cart, but all the items added to it could have some sort of dept attribute that is used to demarcate.

One suggestion I have is that instead of having the user select the group/department after login, you make the department a required part of the login params. That way, you can know and inform the user right away is someone else is already logged in with the same account for that dept. It's pretty restrictive, but sometimes it's better to let the user know ahead of time rather than have them select items and then learn that the particular dept. cart is locked! Just my 2 cents...