The Cart Blog

Most of my discounting modules have “Promotional Pages” – specially built pages that list all the discounts, which can be linked to from the Information Sidebox (or any other sidebox or area on your Zen Cart page).  But because Manufacturer Discount already had several built-in promotional options – marketing text on the product info page,  a centerbox feature – I didn’t think a promotional page was truly needed.  Well, I changed my mind and added the promotional page!

You can read more about Promotional Pages for all my Zen Cart discounting modules, or if you’re a Manufacturer Discount user, you can just grab the new Manufacturer Discount Promotional Page.

*** Warning: This is only suitable for use on your own computer for test carts which are not on the public Internet.   Actual live carts which are in production should abide by the forced rename so the URL to your admin is not known or easily guessed. ***

If you want to use the admin URL “admin” in Zen Cart 1.5.x, it’s a pretty simple change.  Edit the file

admin/includes/init_includes/init_admin_auth.php

and  insert the following line above line 12:

define('ADMIN_BLOCK_WARNING_OVERRIDE', '1');

That’s all!

Different rates of tax for shipping

This is an uncommon situation, but it may apply to you if you are from British Columbia, Canada.

If you have taxable shipping but the tax rate is different than it is for products, you’ll need to make some code changes. Firstly, be sure your descriptions for shipping taxes include an easily identifiable string such as “on shipping”

Then, in the discount module you use, skip over this tax when computing the updated amount of tax.

Here is a block of logic from Quantity Discounts 1.11. (Newer versions may look different.)

       switch ($this->calculate_tax) {
       case 'Standard':
          reset($order->info['tax_groups']);
          while (list($key, $value) = each($order->info['tax_groups']))
          {

             if (strpos($key,"on shipping") !== false) {
                continue;
             }

             $tax_rate = zen_get_tax_rate_from_desc($key);
             if ($tax_rate > 0) {
                $od_amount[$key] = $tod_amount = round((($od_amount['total'] * $tax_rate)) /100, 2) ;
                $od_amount['tax'] += $tod_amount;
             }
          }
          break;

Here is a block of logic from Big Chooser 1.2.16. (Newer versions may look different.)

       switch ($this->calculate_tax) {
       case 'Standard':
          reset($order->info['tax_groups']);
          $taxGroups = array_keys($order->info['tax_groups']);
          foreach ($taxGroups as $key )
          {

             if (strpos($key,"on shipping") !== false) {
                continue;
             }

             $tax_rate = zen_get_tax_rate_from_desc($key);
             if ($tax_rate > 0) {
                $od_amount[$key] = $tod_amount = round((($taxable_amount  * $tax_rate)) /100, 2) ;
                $od_amount['tax'] += $tod_amount;
             }
          }
          break;