Minimum product price, regardless of quantity

[antbeater]

I would like to be able to set up a minimum product price which isn't dependent on product quantity.

Example of what I'm looking to achieve:
If the product is pens, each pen costs 1 dollar, but I want a base price of 10 dollars.
Customer can order between 1-10 pens and the price will stay 10 dollars, or they can order any quantity beyond 10 pens which will be 1 dollar each.

The only way I found to achieve this in vanilla is using quantity price, so 10 pens and more cost 1 dollar each, while under 10 pens have different price.
I have two problems with this:
1. I don't want this to be visible because it adds unnecessary clutter, using the quantity price forces it in a table. I prefer to explain this to the customer in other ways (e.g. in description and through the use of Dynamic Price Updater).

2. For some or all of the products relevant to the question I already have quantity pricing, and in those cases I *do* want the quantity price table to be visible. In those cases I have just 2-3 price brackets, if I also have to add base price I would have to sometimes add up to 15 prices to achieve a base price alone. It would be unreasonable to use the quantity price system for that.

The solutions I can think of are:
1. To be able to hide sections of the quantity price so they're invisible in the product page, while others are visible.

2. Another field in the product creation page for Minimum Price. There's currently Unit Price and Minimum Quantity (and Zen treats "minimum quantity" more like "default quantity" tbh and only enforces it in checkout) which are calculated as expected, a Minimum Price field would have Zen show that price as the default on the page and only show Price * Quantity when the result is higher than the Minimum Price.
I couldn't find a plugin or function that might allow that though.


Using:
Zen 1.5.7b-11232020
Installed fresh using scp (local testing environment)
MariaDB 10.3.27
PHP 7.3.27
I *think* I noticed this before I installed the following, not sure though:
Dynamic Price Updater 4.0.0-b3
OffsitePayment 2
(Definitely before I installed these, which I think are inherently irrelevant: OnePage 2.3.7, EditOrders 4.5.5, Cross-Sell 1.5)
Using default Responsive Classic

[swguy]

If you just set the minimum quantity for pens to 10, this problem goes away.

[antbeater]

If you just set the minimum quantity for pens to 10, this problem goes away.

Thank you for the quick response.

This doesn't make the problem go away because:
1. Zen Cart doesn't enforce minimum quantity until checkout, which is very confusing so I'd rather avoid that as much as possible. Adding confusion doesn't "make the problem go away" even if this solution was what I'm looking for, which it isn't, because:

2. I want to allow order of less than 10 pens, minimum quantity prevents that. I'm asking about minimum price, not minimum quantity.

[DrByte]

Zen Cart doesn't have any built-in "enforced minimum order amount".

You can certainly add something like that yourself, but you'll have to write your own custom code to do that.
Simplest approach would be to adapt a "minimum order fee" module to auto-adjust itself to charge the difference between the current cart balance and your minimum threshold.
You could supplement that pre-checkout with some sort of on-screen messaging that their cart balance is too low. The current balance of the cart, assuming you only offer one currency, is determined via $_SESSION['cart']->show_total()

[mc12345678]

Some other ideas would be to disable the undesired features based on an indicator, to use CSS for specific "groupings" to hide the content found to be problematic/undesirable. Rules for the CSS path can be found in the readme file in includes/templates/template_default/css/

Understand though that CSS hiding doesn't remove the content from a webpage search engine which can be both good and bad.