Product sort order

Alright - I'm trying to re-sort my product listings from price low to high, products name to - well, anything else at this point. I'm going to admin/configuration/all listing/display product display - default sort order:

1= Products Name
2= Products Name Desc
3= Price low to high, Products Name
4= Price high to low, Products Name
5= Model
6= Date Added desc
7= Date Added
8= Product Sort Order

It's currently set to "4" but it does not change the product display in my store?

Any help?

This setting is only for the All Product Listing ... each Listing has its own setting ...

If a sort order is not working that involves price, this usually is due to importing products and not having the products_price_sorter setup right ... which is usually caused by imported products ... and these would be missing the master_categories_id ...

But first, make sure you are using the right setting to sort the display that you are looking at ...

I did use EZ Populate to import my data. I guess I don't understand where to find the products_price_sorter.

The products table in your database has two key fields:
master_categories_id
products_sort_order

The master_categories_id is used to work with pricing such as Sale Maker or navigation to know what the "main" category is for a product when one is not known ...

The products_price_sorter is the bottom line price of the Product so that the calculation does not have to be done during the display, sort etc. of the listings ...

If you have no Linked Products, then this can easily be fixed by running in the Tools ... Store Manager ...

Reset ALL Products Master Categories ID
to be used for Linked Products and Pricing:

Then the products_price_sorter can be rebuilt by running from the Store Manager:

Update ALL Products Price Sorter
to be able to sort by displayed prices:

These two fields are maintained in the Zen Cart Admin when adding/editing products ... but when importing products, they are often overlooked or incorrect ...

NOTE: always backup your database before running commands such as these ...

I have set every sort option that I can find to key on the model but it is still using the name,model sequence or ignoring it all together. An example of the ignore can be seen here http://stampimages.net/n_america/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=4&sort=20a&filter_id=11

(The first real image should be the second and the last should be the first. The missing one is really a pixel_trans.gif.)

The values are all set to model in ALL LISTINGS, NEW LISTINGS, FEATURED LISTINGS, LAYOUT SETTINGS and PRODUCT LISTING and I did Reset ALL Master categories ID

Am I missing something?

The other sort issue I am having is that there is NO sort in my admin, see http://www.stampimages.net/images/sort_issue.jpg for what it looks like. When I changed the format of the products name (many are now duplicated within a category - see the page link above) any sign of sorting vanished in those admin categories.

These issues may have something to do with Easy Populate as suggested above. If so, what other options beyond setting the individual sort for each product are there?

This is too weird, after several hours of it looking like it did, it came back to life and sorted everything correctly in admin. May have been a low priority task on the server, anyway, who cares!

The issue of not sorting by model is still not resolved but I think I figured out a workaround for that one. Will do some testing to see how it does.