AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

We are very puzzled as to why AC does not allow the combination of volume discounts like it does coupons, but since it does not, we tried to set-up our Cyber-monday sale using coupons instead. It took quite a while, but we finally got all 300+ items that we were wanting to put on sale listed in the coupon.

When we went live, it crashed our site. Apparently the large volume of sale items overloaded the system and stalled it out. We could have used categories instead, but it was not an option listed.

In the discounts, categories are an option and they do not slow our site down.

In the coupons, categories are NOT an option and lots of individual products stall out the site.

So, since we cannot combine volume discounts, we have no way of putting any items that have a quantity discount associated on an additional sale. HMMMM. That is enough of a problem that we are considering purchasing a new shopping cart software program if we cannot come up with a solution here.

It seems a VERY easy fix to allow combined discounts, so am wondering why it's not an option??

Has anybody else ever had a problem with coupons like this?

Hello Kristi,

Combining discounts leads to questions such as which discount get's applied first? The rules can become overwhelming. Coupon discount on a category doesn't sound bad, but still we don't have an easy way to decide which is first. The coupon with 300+ items shouldn't of had any issue with site stability and I'll report it.

EDIT: Please let me know where the site was having trouble when you had 300 items assigned to a coupon?

Thanks for your response.

I see your point as to the confusion on the discounts.

One thing that would greatly help would be to change the "pricing rule" set-up, which appears to be the only way to show "sales" on product pages. Pricing rules do not work on many of our items as they have variants (5 yards, 10 yards, 50 yards) and the pricing rule only changes the original price. A good idea would be to have a "pricing rule" column in the variants admin page next to the "price" column, and why not just call it "sale price" instead? If there is something listed in the "sale price" column, it would automatically apply and display. That way we would also have the option of putting some of the variants on sale and not others (great if we wanted to close-out the pistachio color and not the pink) The only negative that I could see with that set-up would be that there would not be a good way to bulk-edit the pricing rules if they are attached to the variants, but I still think we would use the feature a lot.

For the discount problem, maybe instead of calling it "discounts", you can have a better way to run "sales" besides having to add pricing rules. You could have "discounts" which are used as they are currently set-up for quantity price breaks, etc., and then have a completely different category of "sales" options which figure after the "discounts" are applied and have the option of either being combined or not. It looks like "coupons" are kind of like this, except that they have to enter a code and you have to select individual products.

As for our site issues with the coupons, as soon as we made the coupons "active", the site slowed to a crawl and even timed out on several occasions. We tried it on several different computers and it was the same on all of them. I de-activated the coupons and the site then went back to normal. All pages slowed down, not just the shopping basket. The entire site stalled out.

I hope that this is some help.