[christindall]

I'm looking for a way to mark various products with different lead times, or as "special order".

I have thousands of products in stock and ready to ship, but I also have products that I drop ship, and products that are essentially ordered on demand (when the customer orders) that requires additional lead time before they ship from us.

My first question is - has someone already developed this, and I can just buy it?

If not...

I've considered using extra fields - but I don't want to have to type in a lot of text in to each product. I considered using a single extra field and hard coding specific values and tying them to txt attributes so that I can mass change the message should I need to. To do this, I would have the extra field, and have predefined values (ie, 0 = immediately available, 1 = 1 extra week before it ships, 2 = 2 ...etc) - and then do an if test for value and display the appropriate txt variable.

But ideally (and eventually) I'd like this to be able to control the text on the purchase button (ie, "buy this special order item now" vs "buy this now"), as well as possibly button color, and even as far as launching a popup...

So I'm thinking that utilizing an extra field might be cumbersome, which has led me down the path of exploring what other options there are.

Does anybody have any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks!