"acceptance of terms" button before proceeding..

[steve0]

I have a client with an online store looking to implement an additional function.

They desire to have something in place that requires the customer to check/click
a box/button that signals that they, the customer, 'ACCEPTED' the terms of sale.
(it needs to be accepted only before the addition of the first item to the cart)

The shopping cart and checkout are handled by a third party on a
separate server and are not customizable so the mod must be done at the store level.

The items are POST'ed to this shopping cart via FORMs.
Each item is assigned to a form with a unique name, so there may be
15 or 20 "forms" on a page.

I am thinking something along the lines of a javascript to inhibit the
submission of the form until the acceptance value is 'true'.

Once 'true'.. a cookie/session could be set so as to suppress the javascript for
all subsequent additions to the cart (during that visit).

Does that make sense?

Any ideas or methodologies would be helpful.

[DaveSawers]

You can certainly do that with JavaScript. Best way is to disable the form submit button until the user has accepted the terms. And you can certainly remember the setting in a cookie.

But what about those users who have Javascript disabled and/or won't accept cookies? For those users, it's better to keep some data in database tables on your server and use them to determine which user has added items to their cart, whether they've accepted the terms, etc. This also allows you to track users who didn't complete the checkout for some reason.

[Dinghus]

Everybody always asks "what about those people who are so paranoid or in the dark ages?"

It is good to see a lot of websites now saying "You MUST accept cookies and have Javascript enabled to use this site".

Just like saying "No shirt, no shoes, no service".