zen cart for contact lenses?

I found the parse time culprit, although I don't really understand it -
When I set a product off of "priced by attribute" parse time goes from 3-4 seconds to .5 - however my prices display incorrectly, as it is then adding an extra box to the total.

Is there a way to suppress the showing of attribute price factors? I could simply hide a price factor offset in one of the quantity attribute sets if I could hide it's "+$74.20" in the quantity field. This would give me the correct total, and allow me to leave the "priced by attributes" setting off.

I did implement this fix and it works like a charm. I commented out two lines in my override's attributes.php file to hide the factor prices - so my quantity fields now only show the #
I still have to go through the products and set them all this way, I should be through that phase tomorrow.:shocking:

Problem now solved globally. WOOT!
I still have to add some to the power ranges though,
I'm hoping it won't screw up the previously set products when I change the sort order to add more values under -12.00D - It should be ok I think, as the sort orders are also stored in the product associations right?

Strangely there really was no answer to why the problem occurs, just a way to work around it by not using price by attributes. There are some notes on the forum about disabling the priced by attribute features for speed optimization, but this is suggested in the admin - attributes section. I have no idea why price factoring still works with priced by attributes turned off in each product, but hey.
**Note: I've removed the hidden base price attribute globally, and set prices back into the original price field. **

the cart gets a single box to start with, to set the price. ie, before the quantity is set using attributes, the cart is set to quantity "1" so it can show the price per box. So, ok, we leave the one box in the total, and alter the price factors (multipliers) that occur in the quantity attributes.
The right eye charges 2 boxes for 2, 3 for 3, etc.
The left eye, to compensate for the extra box, now charges 1 for 2, 2 for 3, etc.
In the order total, the correct quantity is displayed per side, the correct total number of boxes is charged
Now that the delimiters and prices are commented out, it also looks correct on the product pages.

the cart gets a single box to start with, to set the price. ie, before the quantity is set using attributes
You should actually be able to effect this without attributes using the min & unit in the product setup

You should actually be able to effect this without attributes using the min & unit in the product setup

Not that I could see. Maybe I'm not explaining correctly. Min/Unit applies globally to a product, whereas I need to have the capacity to order two separate prescriptions and quantities at one time. (2 boxes for left and maybe 4 for right, for example)

There is one potential problem with the setup, which is that a customer who has the same prescription for both eyes, can't just enter the prescription once and increase the quantity for one eye. This would mess up my price factor offset system, so I will most likely not implement a fix at this time, as this may affect only a tiny percentage of our clients, and is only a minor inconvenience.

during the change of our hosts, Google indexed our site by IP address, causing multiple listings. I've come to understand that our site http://opticalnow.ca is supposed to be the "canonic" source (we have 7 other url's that point at it as well), and I've seen some info on 301 redirects, but I would like some feedback before I attempt to implement a solution for this. Has anyone run into this issue on moving hosts?

solution: via **.htaccess **

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(the ip address)
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This worked like a charm for redirecting the IP results to our canonic domain name - I have set domain forwarding for the other domains that point at the site, so they should be reading as canonic as well.
:clap: