How to handle a cart page with identical SKU products?

[brian_campbell]

I was reading over your the SiteCatalyst Tag and E-Commerce Extension articles and typically seeing product_id mapped to a sku. With the general format for s.products= product_category;product_id;product_quantity;product_price I do not see another identifier to distingush between products with the same SKU. We have this issue on our cart page, but we also include a unique 'ItemId' for each product. In the E-Commerce Extension article I see _cprod and _csku but both are mapped to product_sku. Is this standard practice? It seems in our case _cprod would be ideal for our 'ItemId'. Could you explain how having a different _cprod and _csku values impacts the s.products string? On the cart page, we are going to want to track, qty changes, removals, product edits etc for each product so we need both the sku and itemid reported when these events are fired. Thanks

[jared_hislop]

Brian, Good eye! Typically the E-commerce Extension is set up so that _cprod is defined with product_id (item ids) and _csku is defined with product_sku. There is typically two different values. The SiteCatalyst template is currently set up to pull what ever value is mapped to _cprod and fill in the product_id section of the product string. This is how the product string is filled in with the E-commerce Extension: s.products = _ccat ; _cprod ; _cquan ; _cprice ; ; If you want both the sku and id tracked then one would need to be passed as a Merchandising eVar which can be accomplished by mapping _csku or product_sku to PRODUCTS_eVar##. Hope this helps