Price Banding

[RicM]

Hi,

I'm struggling with this one. I have a number of downloadable products priced by attribute.

The products fall into four price bands. Call them A, B, C, D. To apply the correct price to a new product I have to assign it to one of four dummy categories. I can then go to the reference product in that category (a product that holds the correct attributes and prices but is not for sale) and copy values to all products in that dummy category.

After doing this I have to reassign all products in that dummy category to the final category used for sales. (I have only the one selling category and do not wish to have or need multiple categories for downloadable products.)

This is a bit laborious - although I can at least batch products together and repeat these actions once per category per upload of products.

Can anyone think of a simpler. more elegant way of fixing prices in bands?

Thanks,
Ric

running 1.3.9h

[rstevenson]

I'm not sure but perhaps if you use one of the "populate" mods -- like EZPopulate or Apsona -- you would enter everything but the price, do a download and edit it in Excel, then upload the changed file to update the cart. Have a look at Apsona first; I think the free version of EZPopulate doesn't do attributes.

Rob

[RicM]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your reply.

I tried EP but found it quite clumsy. I then tried Apsona and thought the interface was great. I ran into problems when it came to the attributes and started to wonder if there was a bug during the import routine.

I think Apsona has potential but I'm not sure it's well enough developed yet. One thing is for sure: to get the best out it the way forward is to create an excel spreadsheet with all the formulae in place and to export just the columns you need using macros (or, better, VBA) for the csv format.

In terms of workload, Apsona requires a line per product and a line per product attribute in the attributes file. I have up to 7 attributes and this is a big overhead, It turns out to be less work to use ZCs copy to category: I have to worry only about the products and the attributes are added with incredible ease.

For ZC I understand there will be improvements in the product/options/option values/price aspects. It's going to be welcomed by many when it happens.

Thanks again,
Ric