[Not a bug] Sale Not Applied To Linked Products

I have noticed that sales aren't applied when the products in the sale category are linked from another category.

That is, if Products "A" and "B" belong to Category "C" (which has many other products) but I have created linked versions in Category "D", creating a sale that points to Category "D" does not cause those products to be discounted as expected.

:oops:

I cannot simply apply the sale to category "C" as it applies only to certain products which fit in that category.

If I create DUPLICATE versions of the products and place them in Category "D", then the sale price is applied to the duplicates. This is better than nothing, but because the sale price is not applied to the originals as well this is not a complete workaround.

Unfortunately I do not see an easy fix for this. Basically, when getting a product's price, it would have to check for links in categories that have sales and then get the sale price.

Forgot to include ZC version: v1.3.9h

SaleMaker is based on the master_categories_id of the Products in the Categories that are marked on Sale ...

Otherwise, you would run into too many issues of a Sale in a Sale in a Sale and too much of a draw on calculating these Sales based on how SaleMaker works ...

Temporarily reassigning the Master Category ID (top of the product editing page) may be a workable solution if you don't have too many to handle. Still not really desirable if the master category is actually meaningful to you, as you would be likely to end up with products drifting to various master categories if you didn't keep a strict eye on it.

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Originally Posted by Ajeh

SaleMaker is based on the master_categories_id of the Products in the Categories that are marked on Sale ...

Otherwise, you would run into too many issues of a Sale in a Sale in a Sale and too much of a draw on calculating these Sales based on how SaleMaker works ...

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@Ajeh - As far as I'm concerned, SaleMaker is essentially broken. Or maybe you could say it has fatal design flaws. Either way, it's very limited in its capabilities and useful applications.

Maybe this isn't really so much a problem with SaleMaker as it is with the way Linked Products are implemented. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of a linked product so that you can apply a change that gets propogated everywhere it's referenced? If I apply a sale to a category with a linked product, I expect that sale to apply to the linked product, and I expect that "link" to make sure the sale gets applied EVERYWHERE that particular product is displayed.

If it doesn't that way, then either SaleMaker is broken, or the whole concept of Linked Products is broken. The limitations of SaleMaker may be partially based on the way other things work, but that doesn't make it OK. As I see it, the only SaleMaker scenario that really works and does what one would expect is when you create a sale for a category that has no linked or duplicate products in it. Any scenario with linked products is going to result in the correct on-sale price not being shown at some point.

I am not entirely sure what you mean by "Sale in a Sale in a Sale" so perhaps you could explain that?

Perhaps the solution is a feature similar to SaleMaker that works on something other than the product category. Suppose we could add tags to products, for example, then create a sale which includes all products with the selected tags.

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Maybe this isn't really so much a problem with SaleMaker as it is with the way Linked Products are implemented. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of a linked product so that you can apply a change that gets propogated everywhere it's referenced?

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If you apply a sale to that individual product that is linked to many categories then you will achieve the desired result, but it won't happen the way you are wanting to do it, sorry.

Salemaker is designed to add sales to groups of products - either whole categories or the whole store, it doesn't then "reach out" to those individual products that may be linked to a certain category that is on sale.

A Sale in a Sale would be where you have multiple Sale Maker Sales setup on their Categories ... and a Product happens to be Linked to 2 or More of those SaleMaker Categories ...

Now, the Sale of 5% to Category A and 10% to Category B and 25% to Category C would get compounded when a Product is Linked to Category B and Category C ...

So, SaleMaker is based on just Products that use a Category categories_id as its master_category_id ...

Specials, on the other hand work on a Product regardless of its Category or Linked Category ...

But, be aware a Product on both Sale and Special can have some surprising results ...