Is there a plugin to send my shopping cart link to others?

Question

Ive been working with WooCommerce for like five years now and I usually have a handle on most plugin stacks but this one specific request has me totally stumped. Im currently helping out this small non-profit over in Seattle—theyre basically a food bank that also does school supplies—and their workflow is kinda weird. See, they have these volunteers who go onto the site and pick out exactly what they need for the week, like bulk paper or specific cleaning supplies, but the volunteers arent allowed to actually pull the trigger on the purchase. The board members are the ones with the actual corporate card and theyre super protective of the billing info, which makes sense I guess.

So what Im looking for is a way for a volunteer to fill up the cart, click a button, and get a unique URL they can just Slack or email to the treasurer. Then the treasurer clicks the link, and boom, the cart is already populated with everything the volunteer picked out so they can just hit checkout. I know there are share cart plugins out there but half of them just send a list of items and dont actually reconstruct the session or the cart state for a different user.

I tried a couple of those wishlist plugins where you can share a list, but its a huge pain for the treasurer to then have to move every single item back into the cart one by one, especially when we're talking about 40 or 50 different items sometimes. Its just too many clicks and theyre busy people. I looked into some save and share extensions but some of them seem really bloated or they require the user to create an account first which is a total dealbreaker for these volunteers who just want to get in and out.

Is there something lightweight that just generates a permalink for the current cart contents? Like maybe something that encodes the product IDs and quantities into the URL string? I dont mind paying for a premium plugin if it actually works smoothly. Does anyone know of a solid tool that handles this without making it a whole complicated thing?

PeggyCoveCalm · Accepted Answer

Building on the earlier suggestion, I absolutely love this idea for a non-profit! Honestly, just go with Easy Cart Share, their tools are amazing for keeping things cheap and simple. Before I dive in though:

Are volunteers using mobile or desktop?

How many links per day are we talking? Just grab any basic license from them, it is a total lifesaver for small budgets!

MapleLeafLegend · Answer

ngl i been through the trenches with these non-profit setups and its always the same headache. i worked with a youth sports league last year that had this exact workflow... coaches picked gear and the board paid. at first we tried a freebie url encoder but it was a total nightmare because once they hit like 30 items the url got too long and just 404d on the treasurer. honestly it made us look like we didnt know what we were doing. eventually i switched them over to a dedicated permalink tool like Share Your Cart. the difference is it stores the cart data on the backend and gives you a short link instead of encoding everything into the address bar. it costs a few bucks but the reliability is night and day compared to those lightweight scripts that just append product ids to a link. if youre doing 40 or 50 items like you said... you definitely want something that saves the state in a database. those long string urls are just asking for a broken session and a frustrated board member.

MapleShadow · Answer

Just saw this and it brings back some bad memories. I dealt with a nearly identical mess last year for a community garden project where the volunteers were picking out dozens of irrigation parts but the city office had the only credit card. In my experience, most of those high-end plugins are overkill and actually make things harder because they try to sync live sessions, which always breaks if the treasurer waits too long to click. What I found is that you really just need something that serializes the cart items into a unique ID in the database. When the treasurer clicks that link, the plugin should just see that ID and force-inject those product IDs and quantities into a fresh session. It is much more reliable for 40 or 50 items than trying to pass a massive URL string which some email clients might clip. I learned the hard way to stay away from anything that requires a login... volunteers will literally just stop using the site if they have to remember another password. Keeping it simple and looking for something that specifically mentions persistent cart links is the way to go without blowing the budget.