I am still pretty new to CS Cart and I am looking into trying to put a product up for sale for a period of time. There appears to be a function to make a product available at a certain date but I am looking in to making the product no longer available after a specific date. Could anyone help me out by pointing me in the right direction of this sort of add on or maybe a link to an already existing plugin?
Deal of the Day plugin for CS-Cart does exactly as you describe. I have installed it and set it up and tested the functionality - great add-on but be prepared for styling it to suit your store, the default style isn't the prettiest in my opinion.
I think the only way you can accomplish this is to manually adjust the “Available from” date to something way out in the future when you don't want to offer it anymore (temp or permanent).
To add an expiration date will probably require a small amount of custom development.
[quote name='StellarBytes' timestamp='1320459541' post='125360']
Deal of the Day plugin for CS-Cart does exactly as you describe. I have installed it and set it up and tested the functionality - great add-on but be prepared for styling it to suit your store, the default style isn't the prettiest in my opinion.
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Thanks for the info.
Just as a follow up, is it possible that at the end of the sales period to have it switch to an unavailable status or prevent people for purchasing anymore of the product? I would also like the feature of only selling an item for a fixed length of time, after the time expires customers can no longer purchase the item.
[quote name='uhoherk' timestamp='1320465907' post='125376']
Thanks for the info.
Just as a follow up, is it possible that at the end of the sales period to have it switch to an unavailable status or prevent people for purchasing anymore of the product? I would also like the feature of only selling an item for a fixed length of time, after the time expires customers can no longer purchase the item.
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When you create a 'Deal of the Day', which can be set up for as many products and as long as you wish, you set the 'Available from' and 'Available to' dates of the promotional price.
You could therefore set the promotions 'Available to' date to the same 'Available to' date on the product which would give you a time-specific sale price and ultimately make the product unavailable once the sale price expires.
You probably could edit the DOTD add-ons source code to set the product to hidden once the 'available to' date expires, but this is obviously beyond the scope of the add-on in its current form and would require custom development.
Once you have added the field, you can apply any logic/actions you want. Note the standard cart only has “available from” and NOT “available to”. So you'd add the “available to” datum, then you would have to either “delist” a product when it is selected (and the date is checked - not recommended to have a product disappear under a customer) or you'd have to run a cron job (or other trigger) to scan the products and change the status of those that have exceeded their 'available to' date.