Promotions and Quantity discount limitation.

We have no intention of misleading anyone. It never pays off to do so. The documentation on the Promotions feature speaks clearly about the limitations that currently affect it.

Here is a bit of background on this feature.

• We wrote the code to include the ability to run promotions such as "Buy a product and get another one free" or "Buy 2 of something and get 25% something else"
  
• We started extensive testing
  
• We discovered several conflicts that turned out to be hard to resolve.

It's one of those cases in which we find ourselves victim of ProductCart's particularly deep feature set (e.g. not a lot of other e-commerce software has category-level quantity discounts). Among the challenges:

1. Product-based quantity discounts on both the product that triggers the promotion and those that are the tarted of the promotion (which is why in the current implementation you can either have quantity discounts or promotions on the product: easy to handle when the promotions is only on the same product)
2. Category-based quantity discounts (the products that are part of the promotion might belong to different categories, and some of them might have quantity discounts assigned)
3. Overlapping promotions (For example: if you buy A, you get 25% off B; if you buy C, you get 25% off B; what happens if you buy A & C? Do you get 25% or 50% off of the price of B? What if there is a promotion on B itself, like 'Buy 1 and get 50% off the 2nd unit?)
4. Build To Order configurations (What if special prices were assigned within a BTO configuration? Does the promotion still apply? E.g. If there is 'Buy 1 get 1 Free' on Extra Virgin Olive Oil, does it still apply when that product is part of a customizable gift basket?)
5. Etc. Etc.

Of course, many ProductCart merchants don't use any of these features, but here at Early Impact we can't start from the assumption that features that are available in the software will not be used at the same time. They very well may be. So, if there are conflicts, the store manager needs to be alerted and/or prevented from triggering them. Doing so, however, is not trivial at all when there are store management tools that allow a certain condition to be set in many different ways (e.g. you can copy quantity discounts from one product to N other products).

The Promotion feature is going to be reviewed again for ProductCart v4.5 (scheduled for release at the end of Q1). We might reintroduce some of the functionality by adding a large amount of checks in the Control Panel to determine whether a certain promotion can be added or not. A final decision has not been made on this. We'll keep you updated.

As always, we certainly welcome any feedback on the above.

Thanks for reading this long post!

massimo