Marcus,
I've stated on numerous threads very clearly that Vol Discs. work. I use them and if you'll read my post more clearly, I didn't say they don't work "for anyone". I state that they are useless to use if you have dozens of products. I can't spare the time to build volume discounts on 20, 30 products for a short term 'offer'. Nobody can. So for a large 'volume discount' promotional, they ARE useless. They don't even clone along with a product. That would help.
And for Pete's sake, why not Vol Discounts that offer XX% off if you buy 2, XX% off if you buy 3....????? You have no idea what it takes to calculate the $ figures for 20, 30, 40 products all priced differently - because you don't run a store. You don't run a store, you've posted a few products for sale that don't change on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Marcus, sit next to someone who actually runs a store with 100's of products coming from dozens of suppliers that change prices, policies, shipping parameters, discounts, seasonal sales, photos for a few days. Really, do it. Applying some of the features of the software is torture... BUT YES, THEY WORK if you can spare the time!
Making products active/not active is a royal PITA. Each product has to be opened. Can't this be done on the products page? Yes, it can!! A bit of ease for the merchant here. A light to show if any sales, discounts, etc apply would be a great help. Keeps product attributes for at least this part of the marketing plan in plain sight. Red light, x-mas sale is still applied past a notice date - gotta cancel it.
Try this... Add 50 new products to your store and get them into the Cross sells list on 150 other products.... Show us how to do this in less than 12 hours, PLEASE! But yes, Cross Sells do work... this feature that's designed to expose products just isn't designed very well. Even a random Cross Sells picker would be nice to have. ie: Click "Random" and every product in the store (or just from chosen category(s)) has a chance at being seen as Cross Sells without needing to sit at the computer for hours.
Shipping is a HUGE stumbling block. BUT IT WORKS. Perhaps this can be made to work.....
F'rinstance:
A box shipping 1 bowling ball doubles in volume and weight when you add 1 more ball to the order. We should be able to set 2 as the limit before a second box is created when 3 are ordered.
A box shipping 1 box of gift cards will stay the same even if you put 4 more boxes of gift cards in the same package. Why? because the box needs to be big enough for the label. That's likely also big enough for 4 more boxes of cards too.
There's gotta be a way to make that work by category and/or product.
You aren't dealing with this because you don't ship anything. Totaling up static product volume is the easy way out.
Marcus, you don't print labels nor get invoices from UPS, Fed Ex 2 weeks later that are in 'error', sometimes by a lot of $. You don't email customers with explanations as to why shipping was too high or too low. You don't run BOGO, seasonal sales, manufacturer's specials, category-wide close-outs. You don't deal with MSRP rules, MAP policies, or ship actual boxes inside or out of the country.
You don't collect checks from wholesalers that include payments for a dozen orders. It takes TIME to click all the way through the stacked menus to enter a check payment. 7 IIRC. That's too many and it's easily changed to maybe 2.
And finally, it's been 2 years since the manual has been updated in any meaningful way. (The videos still don't play in FF) Just adding a "search terms" feature would be great. There are a few of us here answering the same questions over and over (the same ones I asked years ago for lack of a decent manual) in an effort to allow you to go about the business of improving your product. How many times are we going to type "Green tabs....."
We're all pulling for you because we think the wait and effort will be worth it. Kitting was a 2 year wait. Some really great customers left while SP2 was getting fixed. Some old-timers reading this know what this means, and we're still here.
If we don't ask for a better product, you won't know what's in need of improvement and we won't get a better product, right? This thread was started almost 2 months ago..... so BOGO is a feature that works really well, or just so-so?
Oh, I'm so glad you've gone to nearly 1K. There are a few of us that saw little hope of survival /support at $499.00.