Restricting coupons to a group of products

I'm just getting started with Zen Cart and many things are not yet obvious to me. I'd like to be able to offer coupons for an arbitrary group of products. Is there any way to do that? Thanks.

Steve

Arbitrary how? As in products you chose at random?

It might as well be random. There is criteria for choosing the products, but the criteria are not something that Zen Cart itself is in a position to evaluate. Mostly, it will be based on marketing incentives that I get from the manufacturer. I'll be using Easy Populate, so I hope to be able to flag the products in a field that gets imported by Easy Populate

1 Stick the Products in a Category together and mark that as the Category for the Product ...

2 Add miscellaneous Products as the restriction on the coupon ...

Thanks Ajeh. Can I do that and still keep the products in their current category heirarchy? Also, could I prevent the new category from showing on the category menu?

Using linked products and then putting that category on the Discount Coupon's restriction ...

Thanks again Linda. For the life of me I don't get the zen of linking products, so I asked how to do it by asking the question in the FAQs section.

However, I may have another approach that might work better for me. Optimally, these same products would also be the Featured Products. Unfortunately, Easy Populate doesn't support Featured Products and there doesn't seem to be a coupon restriction for Featured Products.

The solution requires treading in the land of MySQL, a place that I probably do not belong. After creating the coupon by normal means, I updated the zen_featured and zen_coupon_restrict tables to include the products. This seems to work, but I've only done a small amount of testing. Do you think that this will eventually be blown apart by landmines, or is this a workable solution?

Steve

What is it about Linking that you don't understand?

Linked products are single items that reside in multiple categories.

The part that I don't get is how to create the link. In the sample install, I can see how products are linked. However, for unlinked products, that area is greyed out.

Admin->Catalog->Categories/Products

• find your product
• click on the "c" in the button-bar on the right-hand end of that row
• choose the category you want to link it to
• choose "Link" instead of "duplicate", and submit

Now you'll have "one" product that resides in multiple categories. The master will be the first category you assigned it to, unless you change the master by manually editing the product and changing the master-categories-id via the pulldown above the product-name and available-date.

Thanks Dr. Byte, that works. Unfortunately, this still doesn't seem to help achieve my goal of offering coupons on an arbitrary set of products and updating via Easy Populate. That's because it appears that linked products are not supported by Easy Populate. (I may confirm that in the EP support thread).

In any case, I kind of like my solution which I added a few posts ago: > However, I may have another approach that might work better for me. Optimally, these same products would also be the Featured Products. Unfortunately, Easy Populate doesn't support Featured Products and there doesn't seem to be a coupon restriction for Featured Products.

The solution requires treading in the land of MySQL, a place that I probably do not belong. After creating the coupon by normal means, I updated the zen_featured and zen_coupon_restrict tables to include the products. This seems to work, but I've only done a small amount of testing. Do you think that this will eventually be blown apart by landmines, or is this a workable solution? Does this seem viable?

What I like using is the Multiple Categories Link Manager ...

When you hit the C for Copy, down near the bottom you will see the button to it ...

What this allows you to do is search via Category and Product to see the existing Category or Categories that a Product belongs to ...

One, is the Master Category ( master_categories_id ) ... which is designated by the Yellow icon vs the checkbox ...

Providing a Category has at least 1 Product in it ... it will show on this page ...

Now you can just check the boxes to link the Product to multiple Categories and hit Update ... then find your next Product to manage ...

It is a handy to use feature when trying to Link Products ...

That is convenient and reasonably quick, but still tedious for the volumes that I'll have to update. I'll often have to link 100-300 products and delink a like quantity. Also, missing any delinks could prove costly.

I have linked products. I now want to delink a productbut cannot figure hpw to do it. I've moved it from CLEARANCE cat to the BEADS cat where it was linked to. So now I want to remove the link of it to the CLEARANCE cat. I've gone to the'C' and looked to see f I can undo what I did to link it but I can't take the radio button off the link ... option.

I'm sure it's something simple and I'm sure i'm gonna feel like a geek when someone tells me but ... such is life.

Thank you.

Read Ajeh's post above again.

LOL, told ya I'd feel like a geek.

Thank you.