Overview:

Zen Cart has a built-in mechanism for discounting individual items called Specials (accessible under Admin > Catalog > Specials), and another for discounting entire categories of items called Sales (accessible under Admin > Catalog > Salemaker),

But Sales and Specials are available to all customers, and this may not be what you want. Using this mod, you can segment specials so that they are only available to a particular user or group.

Detailed Description

Configuration

Per User Specials and Per User Sales may be accessed from the Admin > Customers > Customers screen.


These commands may also be accessed from the Admin > Customers > Group Pricing screen.


The list of Per User/Group Specials is shown on its own screen. It can be directly accessed by going to the Admin > Customers > Per User Group Specials.

Each special is listed on a row, with an indicator of whether it is a per-user (U) special or a per-group (G) special.


The currently selected row shows on the right of this screen.

For User Specials, the name of the user is shown. For Group Specials, the name of the group is shown. You can also see the date range for this special (if there is one) and how the price display will look for the user(s) who receive this special.

During editing, it looks like a regular special, except there are dropdown boxes for group or customer id.


Per User/Group Sales also has its own screen, which can be directly accessed by going to the Admin > Customers > Per User Group Sales.


Again, during editing, it looks like a regular sale, except there are dropdown boxes for group or customer id.

Catalog Appearance

On the catalog side, Per User/Group Specials look like any other special. To see them, a customer must login (so that their group and customer number are known to the system).


Specials are not like Order Total modules; items on special have their lowered prices reflected throughout the shopping experience. (Order Total modules, by contrast, create discounts which are only shown at checkout time by default.)

Here is the on special item shown in the shopping cart.


Sales work the same way - they look the same as regular sales, but are only visible to the user/group to which they are assigned.

Installation Instructions:

1. Back up everything! Try this in a test environment prior to installing it on a live shop.
2. Unzip the file you have received
3. Take the file per_user_group_specials.sql and run it in Admin > Tools > Install SQL Patches.
4. Change directory to the common_files folder. Copy the contents to the root directory of your shop.
5. Go back up a level, and change directory to the premerged folder. Change directory to the version of Zen Cart closest to (but not greater than) the version your cart is using. If you have not changed any of these files, you can just copy the ones in this folder to your cart (in the same structure). If you have changed them, see the README.txt included with the mod for the details on how to change each file.

Installation Problems:

The most common installation problems for this module are as follows:

1. If you upload the files in this mod prior to creating the required tables, you will get a blank page. To fix this, revert the file admin/includes/init_includes/init_special_funcs.php to to the version before you installed this mod (or comment out the four lines starting with "pugs_"), then go to your admin and run per_user_group_specials.sql in Admin > Tools > Install SQL Patches. Then put back the changes to admin/includes/init_includes/init_special_funcs.php from this mod.

Major Versions

• Version 1.6 01/26/2023 - Updates for 1.5.8
• Version 1.5 09/30/2020 - Bug in daily sale update
• Version 1.4 06/19/2019 - Updates for 1.5.5f, 1.5.6
• Version 1.3a 09/07/2018 - Small bug in Sale editing
• Version 1.3 10/01/2016 - Addition of Sale support for 1.5.4, 1.5.5a.
• Version 1.2 05/09/2016 - Updates for Zen Cart 1.5.5, 1.5.5a.
• Version 1.1 - 01/03/2015 - Updates for Zen Cart 1.5.4.
• Version 1.0 - 01/01/2014 - First Release.

Bugs

• This plugin does not discount products priced by attributes (or products with priced attributes).
• Version 1.4 had a defect in the daily sale update which could cause a white screen - please upgrade to version 1.5
• Any modification which (like this one) selectively lowers prices in the cart cannot update the products.products_price_sorter field, which enables such things as searching by price range on the Advanced Search page, and sorting by price on a Listing page. Thus, features which depend on this field will operate as though there were no per user or group special prices. (For most shops this is a non-issue but it is listed for completeness.)
• Earlier versions of this mod failed to create indexes on customers_id and customers_group_pricing fields in the per_user_group_specials table. If you have version 1.2 or prior of this mod, you can do this within Admin > Tools > Install SQL Patches.

  ALTER TABLE per_user_group_specials ADD INDEX idx_cust_id(customers_id);
  ALTER TABLE per_user_group_specials ADD INDEX idx_cust_group(customers_group_pricing); 
  

FAQ

Q: How do I install this software?
A: If you've never installed a Zen Cart mod before, please read my Guide to Mod Installation on Zen Cart.

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