UPDATE ON THIS THREAD:
 
I was harsh on Viart in this post, and it's because I've had nothing but problems with the two major features that made me want to upgrade to V4.0.7 of the Cart, and that was the Coupon features wherein you can set up coupons to assist dealers in ordering products from a 'product type' and have the quantities qualify for a discount. Secondly, I wanted the new V4 USPS realtime shipping module which follows the solid V3 implementation that Viart made.
 
In trying to use these features, I was unsuccessful, and asked for help from Viart staff, who responded quickly but the answers didn't help me, and I kept trying with forum posts and such till finally I got an answer that made no sense to me: "Set the number of packages to a decimal". As for the coupons, I was directed to the manuals, but the manuals didn't cover the new settings in V4.0.7, and those settings were not in the 3.6 manual, so it was not helping me understand it.
 
Bottom line, I got what I considered useless answers. In retrospect, being frustrated does not help you ask better questions. I had no intention in offending Viart, but they asked me to reconsider my comments, which I did, and I will retract the 'non working' and 'useless' part of my post, but the rest remains: Viart, admittedly, needs to do a better job on timely documentation, and simplify updates, patches, etc. The 'fidgety' factor of the Viart cart is very high, as I'm sure many others are as well. That does not change the fact that documentation is key.
 
One comment I received from Viart staff was this: "The purpose of any software documentation is to describe the product features not give direct instructions how to set up business schemes such as what discount is better to use: coupons or qty prices, and the best way to describe features is using screenshots instead of bare text. In any case your criticism is accepted and we will try to make documentation better. "
 
Ok, I accept that, and it proves my point that when documentation is saying a coupon parameter is this or that does not help a person using the cart figure out how to use the features, and that was the main point of my frustration with Viart in the first place. What would be more helpful is to explain the purpose of the feature, then explain how it interacts, if any, with other features, then go on to give an example or two which address some of the possible uses. This is done with much of the documentation, and I've praised Viart for that in the past, but in these two cases, the difficulty in finding the solution took far too long, cost me a lot of money and good will with customers, and frustrated me to no end.
 
In the end, had Viart simply documented the 4 new coupon parameters and mentioned that any product pricing would affect the total discount since they were applied in sequence, I would have been able to set things up on my own, instead I had to experiment. As for USPS V4, well, 0.1 packages still does not make sense, and it was not easy to find that information, and when Viart told me that was the problem, I still wondered how, why and for what reason it was 0.1 "packages". Settings at least need to make sense!
 
Bottom line: Viart, I apologize if I criticized you unduly, but there is culpability in the difficulties on both sides here, and I am not asking you to apologize for the work we have to do here to keep the cart working after upgrades! I just want you to document, document and document more, and simplify patches.
 
Ed
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I give up! I've been trying to get a 'how to' from Viart on using the new product coupon features that allow us to create coupons that can be automatically applied once a combined quantity of products from a category reach the minimums. It works to a degree, but it is very unreliable, and auditing it, I can't even guess where some of the discount numbers are coming from.
 
Example:
 
I sell headsets. There are about 6 different models, so I set them all up in a category "headsets". My dealers are in a user category of 'dealers'. I set up coupons for 20%, 25%, 30% and 35% for my dealers, and set them up to apply to the 'headsets' product type, and to the 'dealer' user type. I've made the settings that Viart recommended, but they make no sense at all to me, and in experimenting, I can get it to work right occasionally, but not a second time with the same products and quantities.
 
What SHOULD be happening is that you add say 5 of X and 7 of Y and the system sees that as '5+7=12' products and applies the auto apply coupon for that quantity, in this case my 10-49 price break of 25%.
 
For individual items in the cart alone, the prices in the product 'Prices' settings are applied, but when I add other products, slightly different numbers appear, and in some cases it's shown to apply one discount and then a second one, perhaps the same or a deeper discount, say 20%, and then 30% to get a completely incorrect discount.
 
So, can anyone tell me how to set this up? Viart staff have no clue how it works, and I'm tired of apologizing to my dealers. Viart, either step up and fix your cart, or count me out! I'm tired of wrestling with features that I paid for that don't work. And your endless lack of documentation is another problem, I'm not in business to tend to Viart software all day, I'm in business to serve my dealers and customers, and your cart is interfering with that in many ways.
 
I'll pay if someone can tell me how to make this work.
 
Ed Davis

Hello Ed,
 
As you probably know ViArt has at least twice as many functionality than any other cart and it's really our main goal to document all features well so any customer could read it and set it without any help.
 
If you or any other customer can't find some features described in our manuals or need our help or assistance you are welcome to contact our support team so we can check your settings and advise the best possible solution like you did once.
 
So Ed, please specify exactly what products you add to the cart which give incorrect discount and what discount you require, let us know the order number where it already happened and the user login you're using and send this information to our support team so we could try to help you.
 
Best Regards,
ViArt Team

Yes, Viart has many functions, I get that. The problem you have is that you don't document the features so people can use them without experimenting for days on end to get a simple thing working right. We have no clue how things interact and relate in the system.
 
FWIW, your 3.6 and 4.0 documentation do NOT cover the details of the use of the USER section of the coupons in V4. Besides, I don't call it 'documentation' when the content of the documentation is the same that is printed on the screen while using the admin panels. There is SCANT little information beyond that you see onscreen, and much of that is written hastily and often hard to interpret.
 
Example: I've just spent several weeks during which my business suffered many project delays while I tried to find a way to use the new coupons for dealer discounts and how to make the new USPS interface work, the latter which I've completely given up on Viart staff on that one. On the former, the coupons, I first asked Viart how to use them, and got several useless and one completely irrelevant response.
 
After weeks of tinkering and experimenting, I'll say this to anyone wanting to use them:
 
1. Disable all your product prices, the coupons will apply in sequence and you'll be giving users double discounts, and that's cool if you want to use it that way.
 
2. Set only the CART minimum and maximum quantities for the discount range, mine for example are 20% for qty 5-6, 25% for qty 7-9 and so on.
 
3. You can't use price matrix for dealers since you have to disable all those prices, perhaps you can change the settings on the price matrix in the product pages to not apply the discount if there is another one, but again, Viart cannot explain to me how those work, and I'M TIRED of experimenting. I have work to do that does not fall into debugging and reverse engineering Viart's cart code.
 
4. The system seems to work, but the amount of time I've spend with Viart and in experimentation to learn what seems obvious now is ridiculous.
 
The response above from Vera was sent to me after I've done what she asked me to do twice before, which is where the irrelevant and useless info came from.
 
Sounds like I'm picking on Viart, but I'm not. I respect what they are doing, but like I mentioned to them, it's not the number of features, it's how well they work, and mostly whether we can figure out how to use them, and that's my main complaint here: Staff wants to help, but they are incapable of it in most cases. Don't know if it's language, the complexity, whatever, but it's VERY difficult to use the built in features without excessive work and angst.
 
Ed