My issues with vouchers - cart rules (ps 1.5.2)

[marhor.hr]

This post is intended to be a critique to the user (un)friendliness, so maybe, with some luck the development team will take it into consideration when making future changes .

It might be that I'm not correctly using the functions, but here are my issues:

 

- i don't like it that cart rules and vouchers are treated the same and that they are displayed in the same place together. for instance, I might have a rule like "apply 10% discount for all customers whose order is greater then 100 $". But I might also have vouchers for customer's birthdays (your birthday is next month, so here is a voucher code just for you, it's valid for the next x months). If there were hundreds of users, with birthdays each month, there would be hundreds of birthday cart rules and which i actually don't need to see there. Not to mention other vouchers that can be created per customer. I find it really frustrating having to deal with this huge number of cart rules which are no cart rules at all.

 

- i'd like to be able to make the rule valid for unlimited time. As it is, the valid from and to fields can not be leaved empty.

 

- there should be option to choose if the cart rule can be applied to products with already reduced price. As I understood this option was available prior to version 1.5

 

- there should be option to choose if the cart rule can be applied wit other cart rules (cumulative vouchers). You can achieve this under compatibility with other cart rules selection, but the way this works is totally not user friendly - per default new cart rule is combinable with all other rules, and you have to pick the rules which you want to "uncombine". Now, if I had hundreds of other rules (like birthday rules) i'd have to remove all of them (actually I don't need to do that, because these rules would be limited to single customer, so are not cumulative, but it's unlogical - why are they visible under the rules page in the first place, and finding the ones which i do not wan't to combine in list of possibly hundreds of even thousands of rules is simply too much work).

 

- when I give free delivery to an order in back office, new cart rule is automatically created and it is visible on the cart rule page. Why is this made this way? It's unnecessary. I think this should not be treated as cart rule. Also this automaticaly added (and used) rule is visible in my account/my coupons. Why? it only confuses the customer.

 

- on the other hand, and also unlogical, vouchers/cart rules which are not limited to single customer are not visible in my account/my coupons. In my opinion, if there is a rule that customer can use, he should see it in my coupons...

 

- in back office/customers/customer details, you can see the customers coupon's list. It would be nice to have an option to create a coupon for this customer directly from this page

 

- it would be nice to have the option to import a list of customers (id's or emails) for which thee voucher will be applied. Let's take the birthday voucher as example. I'd like to be able to create voucher/rule named maybe "bday2013-04", and assign it to a list of people which i have previously selected from database (all customers with birthday in april) and prepared as text file for import. That way, i could create one rule per month for all customers, instead of manually creating many rules for each customer.

It would be even bether if there would be a customisable query builder which could select the records directly from database according to conditions for chosen fields (like birthday, gender, postcode, etc.), but maybe this is to much to ask .

 

In general I think that personalised customer coupons should be managed separately from cart rules which are applicable to many customers. They can be treated in the same way in the shoping cart, but in the back office they should be separated.

 

All said, I think that available functions are really powerfull, but like some other things in Prestashop, are developed by people who have'nt actually used them in the real world - they could be much more polished and user friendly. I mean no disrespect by this - Prestashop really is a great product.

Edited April 4, 2013 by marhor.hr (see edit history)

[cvikenzi]

If you want to choose if cart rules can be applied to products with already reduced price, you can try "Non Cumulative Cart Rules With Other Discounts" module