Products with no fixed price, only upon request, how to solve?

[MostlyConfused]

Hi,

me again.
I am really making progress integrating the shop into the site of the bakery on my local server.

While populating it with some demo products, I came across a problem. While most products will have fixed prices, custom made cakes are the exception.

Time and supplies needed for those will greatly vary according to the clients wishes.
I can't set a price for them, ideally it should say something like "nach Aufwand" (according to work) or "bitte anfragen" (upon request).

It should be treated like an ordered product, the owners will know how to handle it from there.
This would also work as a general option for products to display a custom text instead of a price in numbers when checked.

Any ideas?
Cheers

somewhat related P.S.: The skin I use as a base (minimaliser) shows product-specials and sales at the bottom of every page, even though there are none of those. I hid the whole block for now. Should it not "know" if there are sales before displaying it?

[bsmither]

CubeCart will allow for admin-edited order information. Later, the customer will see the order in their Order History.

I have not seen the following events actually happen, but Pending Orders should be presented so that the customer can now "make payment" on that Pending order. I do not know where CubeCart is at on this part of the feature. We will need to go exploring.

Anyway, the sequence of events is suppose to go: Customer puts item(s) in shopping cart. The product has a very low base price, and has some standard options which gives some basic price increases. The customer then visits the first step of the checkout page. This is when the order gets in the database.

According to the needed business processes that affect the final price of the goods, the admin then views that order's summary. Here, on the order's Inventory tab, the admin can change the options, add options, add whole new line items, adjust the item's final line-price, etc.

Than, back at what should happen is as I described above. The customer then makes payment.

But if that feature, making payment, actually doesn't work, we will need to discover something else.

Cubecart has three "Sales" modes: Off, Per-Product (where the sale price must be less than shelf-price and greater than zero), and Global (where a fixed percentage is deducted from the shelf-price of all products. The Sales mode is in admin, Store Settings, Features tab, Sales section.

 

[MostlyConfused]

Thanks,

a lot of what you propose is possible regarding how such orders are actually processed.

But the main problem remains, I can't put any fixed price to the product, or by law it can't be more expensive than that when ordered. 
Instead of the price there must be something like "upon request" or at the least it must be a "starting at" price.

Absolute perfection would be, if for these products the order-button would change to "Enquire" instead. This might be asking too much, but a guy can dream.