Hello Community! I’m trying to get my head around why we allow creating line items with 0 as quantity and still can’t find an answer. I know we are currently setting line items quantity to 0 to remove items from the order but I can’t find any reason why allowing to add to cart with 0 quantity. Is anyone out there using this “feature”, and if yes can you help me understand how please? Please 👎 if you are not using it, were not aware of that, or now that you know, you think it’s not ideal. Thanks in advance!!

This is going to be pretty out there, but we build customized cards out of multiple line items to represent add-ons. However, we allow cards to be both shipped and mailed. Some add-ons only apply to shipped cards, which we allow users to set to later update to 0 quantity from the cart, but they still keep the item because they have a separate mailed quantity. If you add 10 shipped cards with add-ons to the cart, you may decrease to 0 shipped cards (assuming there are still mailed ones), but we keep the add-ons there with 0 quantity so that if you switch back to having shipped cards again, we don't forget all the customizations you chose.

Best use case I can think of is for stores that want to support Buy Nothing Day.

@jon_wu thanks for the feedback. If I got it correctly, you are allowing users to set 0 quantity updating the line items in the cart but never creating it with 0 as quantity, is that correct? If that’s the case, I think that will still be totally possible if we deprecate this behavior.

@kennyadsl in our case, we also add cart items with 0 quantity if you start with 0 shipped, but have mailed cards too, so if you increase the quantity from the cart all the right add-ons will be there. However, this seems like a very specific use case, and one that perhaps isn't widely applicable. There may be better ways to represent add-ons or maybe the current behavior could be restored with a customization, but not allowed by default.

Ah got it, I think there’s a way to present those items in the cart even without having them physically connected with the order with quantity 0. If I got it correctly they do not change from order to order so if those product have a relationship between each other you can still present them close to the item they are associated with, and add a button/form to add to cart with some real quantity, am I right?

These are personalized options, so they are customer and parent item specific. For example, you can choose a card, but then choose to have a custom envelope design (perhaps out of hundreds of options). We need to remember what you chose, even if you start or change to 0, then later increase the quantity. I could imagine storing this info with parent item metadata or something though instead of having these weird 0 quantity items, as we then also have code to filter them out when an order is placed, which feels a bit convoluted.

that’s what I was asking 🙂