The Cart Blog

A lot of people like the idea of automatically adding one item to the cart when another item is purchased, so I wrote Automatic Add to Zen Cart to address this need.

Have you ever wanted to offer discounts based on how much money your customers have spent in the last few days, weeks or months?  Frequency Discounts for Zen Cart allows you to do this.

Checkout Candy for Zen Cart now includes a one click buy button for products without attributes that are displayed as possible upsells. The principle behind Checkout Candy is simple: if you have created a Zen Cart Better Together linkage where one item is present in the cart and another is not, you are encouraged to buy it on the Shopping Cart and Shipping Pages. For example, suppose you create a PROD to PROD linkage between product 3 and 10. If product 3 is present in the cart, and the customer goes to the shopping cart page or the shipping page, they will be prompted to buy product 10 (and shown the terms of the discount). Naturally, this goes well with Discount Preview.

Have a look at Checkout Candy for Zen Cart and see the how you can promote your Zen Cart store’s cross-sells!

If you are using any of my discounting software (Better Together, Combination Discounts, Big Spender, Big Chooser, Quantity Discounts, Frequency Discounts, Military Discounts, Newsletter Discounts) along with Zen Cart Edit Orders or Super Orders please be aware of the following issue.

Running Edit Orders or Super Edit against an order with one of these discounts will improperly change the minus sign in the discount amount to a plus sign.  So a Better Together discount of $15.00 will become a $15.00 surcharge.

The root cause of this bug is that both of these mods, when updating an order, enumerate through a fixed list of classes to see if the order total in question a known native discount (coupons or group discounts), and otherwise, assumes it’s a surcharge.

The fix is to modify admin/edit_orders.php and admin/super_edit.php as follows:  search for

 $ot_class == "ot_coupon"

and add in the classes you are using.   For Better Together, this would be

$ot_class == "ot_coupon" || $ot_class == "ot_better_together"

For Better Together and Quantity Discounts, this would be

$ot_class == "ot_coupon" || $ot_class == "ot_better_together" || $ot_class == "ot_quantity_discount"

“if statements” containing this check occur several times (depending on version) in the two files; make sure you get them all.

A complete list of the classes I have created that require this fix is:

• Better Together: “ot_better_together”
• Big Chooser: “ot_big_chooser”
• Big Spender: “ot_bigspender_discount”
• Combination Discounts: “ot_combination_discounts”
• Frequency Discounts: “ot_frequency_discount”
• Quantity Discounts:  “ot_quantity_discount”
• Newsletter Discounts: “ot_newsletter_discount”
• Military Discount: “ot_military_discount”

If you want a complete if clause that handles all of these plus the built in discounts (including GV), it would look like this:

if ($ot_class == "ot_gv" || $ot_class == "ot_coupon" || $ot_class == "ot_group_pricing" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_better_together" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_big_chooser" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_bigspender_discount" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_combination_discounts" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_frequency_discount" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_quantity_discount" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_newsletter_discount" ||
                 $ot_class == "ot_military_discount"
) {

Zen Cart Better Together now does image display in marketing text, Buy Both Now and Checkout Candy. (The Zen Cart Better Together Promotional Page including Add both to Cart already had this feature.) Older versions of Buy Both Now, Checkout Candy and the Marketing Text are forwards compatible with the new Better Together, but if you wish to use the images for Buy Both Now or Checkout Candy, you must get new versions.  Only $10 to upgrade for existing users! Cheap!

The INTERAC payment method for Zen Cart has now been released.

Big Spender for Zen Cart and Big Chooser for Zen Cart have both been updated with a new parameter called set_constraint_regprice(). What this does is ensure that any items being counted towards the constraints (for Big Chooser) or the threshold (for Big Spender) are regular priced items not on sale or special.

SysCheck – a program which automatically scans your cart for vulnerabilities and problems – has been upgraded with two new features:

• Instead of just looking for .php files in unexpected places, it also checks for .pl, .cgi and .py files.
• It prints the mnemonic hostname of IP Addresses which have accessed your admin panel.

It is available from That Software Guy’s website.

This is what the refund dialog will look like in the INTERAC payment method for Zen Cart.  I’m just wrapping up testing now.