Issue with 3 for 2 discounts.

[skinnybloke]

Hi - using v9.0.4.

Here's another one which I will talk to Actinic support about on Monday - has anybody experienced this?

I have set-up a 3 for 2 discount on all products on my development site (sorry I can't give a url).

If you add 3 products to a basket and you get the cheapest of the 3 for free (fine).

Add 3 more products and you get the cheapest of the 1st block of 3 for free, and the cheapest of the 2nd block of 3 for free - NOT the 2 cheapest of the 6 for free (not the way I would have expected it to work but I can live with that).

This is where I think the bug is:

If you buy 4 or 5 products you get the cheapest of the last 3 added to the basket for free and not the cheapest in the basket. So if you have:

item1: £10
item2: £20
item3: £30
item4: £40
item5: £50

you will get item3 at £30 for free and not item1 at £10.

If you want to test this yourself you will have to get around another bug when you try to set-up a 3for2 discount that keeps asking you to enter a number regardless of what you enter in the fields. The solution requires you have microsoft access and is:

Please see instructions below to set a cart contents discount to “Quantity” to work around the "enter a number" bug:

1) First make a backup of the site “File | Snapshot | Export site
2) CLOSE ACTINIC DOWN
3) Open “ActinicCatalog.mdb” with Access
4) Open the table “Discounts”
5) Scroll down the discount you want to change to “Quantity”, for example “Buy 3”
6) In the column “nDiscountBasis”, change the value to “3”
7) Save the database and close it
8) Now if you Open Actinic you will see the discount is now a quantity discount.

Note, if you make any changes to the discount, the same problem will occur, you will have to select a different discount type and repeat the process.

As this is a bug, our developers are working towards fixing this for a future release, but at present we cannot advise what release that will be

[leehack]

I don't think that's a bug, i think it's correct and as it should be. If you don't run it that way, then customers will buy £30, £40 & £50 in one separate transaction and then the £10 & £20 in another and choose a free gift effectively on that second transaction. An offer should generally be to their full benefit, not yours and has to be setup so there is nothing they can do i.e. multiple transactions to achieve a better deal IMO.

As for the bug and workaround, that's just plain poor if that's true. I'm pretty sure there's a 3 for 2 discount as a standard example already in there, so how did they set that up?

[TraceyHand]

it's weird actually because I was setting up an offer on our site last night (free item with orders over £x) and came across a previous report of this where someone claimed it was 'wrong'

Personally, I think it's open to interpretation. As a seller, you want to be giving away as little as possible so you'd want the cheapest product of all 5 to be free.
However, and perhaps more importantly, as a CUSTOMER, you'd expect it to work differently and you would definitely ruffle a few feathers if it worked as you expect it to.
Ruffling customer feathers is NEVER good, IMO!
Give the customer what they expect and you have happy customers.
Make them feel hard done by or ripped off and...well, we know what the outcome is then!

Can't find the post from yesterday now but, if I come across it again, I'll link it

editted to add link HERE (had initial ignored it in search results because of its STUPID TITLE )

[skinnybloke]

Thanks for the replies and your opinions - nice to know that there are other people working on a Saturday.

The setting up of the 3for2 discount is a known bug - the text within the quotes is as provided by Actinic support,

[Duncan Rounding]

I remember the operation of the 3for2 discount and the choice of which items are free was dicussed some time ago. I think that Actinic responded to say similar to what Lee mentioned above - that the customer needs to be given the best of teh bunch as it were otherwise they may feel they have been incorrectly sold.

[Mike Hughes]

I agree with the others that the customer should be given the 3rd most expensive items as the free one. As a customer that's what I would expect and how I'd do it in a shop.

What version of Actinic are you using? I half remember the 'enter a number' bug but that seems to be from a quite a while ago. Hasn't it been fixed yet?

OK. I re-read and see you're on 9.0.4. I'm surprised it's still there.

OK2. It's in this thread from January. http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=40730 I wasn't best impressed that it wasn't fixed in 9.0.3 so still there in 9.0.5 is a surprise.

Sadly, what disappoints me most is that I almost accept this as typical for Actinic. I hope this will be changing.

Mike

[Jan]

I haven't checked this but I think that it gives them the third item entered for free - might be worth entering a request on the wish list.

Regards,