Display Previous and Sale Prices

[james.toseland]

Hi

I have not yet purchased Actinic, but I am about to start playing with the trial version. It seems to do just about everything I could want of it, however...

I cannot seem to find any referrence in any of the manuals or in the FAQs or in the Forum regarding the store going in to sale.

Is there the facilty to display the 'was £xx.xx' and the 'now £yy.yy' sale price without having to use the description and hence editing each product indivdually?

We tend apply various % discounts across various departments/products and then advertise as 'up to 50% off selected items' for example, but dont neccessarily put all items in to sale.

With over 2000 current items and increasing weekly, it would be an administrative nightmare to have to build the 'was' price in to the description and then alter the price to the 'now' price an item at a time...and then reverse the process when the sale is over.

If Actinic cannot currently cope with this, does anyone have any ideas as to a solution please ?

Thanks in advance
James

[I-CC]

With regards to Actinic showing a was and now price, this is not included as standard afraid, so the only way of achieveing will be manual alterations to the products, but might be lessened somewhat by use of a customvar property in your productline template, i.e:

create a custom property (advanced | custom properties) called SPECIALPRICE

Within your productline template add where you want it to appear: CUSTOMVAR:SPECIALPRICE

Then, say if you are going to average offer a 10% discount or above then assign a default value for the property:

Design | options | defaults | Property (SPECIALPRICE) =

<font color="red">This item is discounted by 10% in the sale</font>

for example...........

This will have the effect of adding that text to all products which use the custom property.

For entire sections of products that you want to give a 20% discount then you would assign the SPECIALPRICE property value to the section properties, and for individual products the actual product itself.

This still does not do away with the need to actually change the price of the products, which for a wide sweeping (all the same amoutn of discount) can be done directly within the Dbs if you have access and the confidence to do this using queries (which has been discussed in the forum before on how to do this), but still no easy (one click) method of achieving what you want...

Suppose, an alternative to this might be simply use Business v7 and its coupons solution, whereby you can assign your products different discounts groups and plaster the discount coupon code across your site so that everyone knows how to get the discounts, so no real single way of doing it, but hope this provides some assistance (some how) anyway.

[james.toseland]

Thanks for that. You've saved me a lot of searching and testing for nothing.

As luck would have it, I am actually pretty competant with MS Access and so should be able to write something that can update each individual product description and tag the 'Was' price on to there before then updating the new discounted price.

I would assume that it would then be a case of simply using Actinic to update the 'live' data with the new descriptions and prices.

Slightly long winded way about but...

I can't believe that something I would have thought was fairly critical to most, if not all, 'retail' sites has been overlooked in what would otherwise appear to be a fairly remarkable piece of software.

Also, is there a simple way of displaying the amount of current stock available and then testing that quantity is not being exceeded when an order is placed?

Last question...I think!

Is there a method of the 'site owner' effectively placing an order purely to reduce the online stock levels? To clarify, I have a retail outlet (designer clothes) and therefore have a finite number of style/colour/size for a product. Therefore, if I sell something in store I want to be able to immediately, via the PC in the store, reduce the available stock level of the item without the hassle of entering customer details and payments, and without reports showing it as a web sale (great if it could show it as a 'store' sale)
Is this totally beyond the scope of the software? or is it something that is either 'doable' or a consideration for a future release?


I appreciate Actinic is pretty much 'all singing, all dancing', but would like to add a few extra tunes if possible!

[james.toseland]

Knew I'd think of another one...

If I was to change the descriptions in the dbs, can I include html tags to highlight/bold/change colour etc or would it be ignored since it is the contents of a field?

[james.toseland]

Please Help someone.

We are a small shop in our first year, and so this is a lot of money to find if it then doesn't do what we need it to do.

Thanks

[cdicken]

Also, is there a simple way of displaying the amount of current stock available and then testing that quantity is not being exceeded when an order is placed?

Use NETQUOTEVAR:STOCKLEVEL within the product layout template to include the stock level.

Is there a method of the 'site owner' effectively placing an order purely to reduce the online stock levels?

You can edit the stock levels of products within the 'Stock' tab of a product (and also in 'View | Stock Levels') and then upload to put products out of stock.

If I was to change the descriptions in the dbs, can I include html tags to highlight/bold/change colour etc or would it be ignored since it is the contents of a field?

Use embedded HTML marks by starting your HTML expression with !!< and ending it with >!! e.g.

!!<<font color="red">Was.... </font>>!!

[james.toseland]

Thanx

Thanks for those answers. You have helped a lot.

I look forward to buying and using your system soon.