It sure would be nice if there was a dynamic way of filling a block with Cart Promotions that are available on products.
Example:
Cart Promotion: Buy product A, get product B free.
Wish:
When users view Product A or Product B, they could see the promotion’s graphic and/or small description in the Product Location (product detail). Placed there with a dynamic fill in the block manager. I could set it and forget it, so when an active promotion is available for products, the promotion would be advertised on the detail page.
Agreed - must have functionality. If you manually put this info in to product details pages which takes a LOT of time if you have 1000's of products with various promotions on, it sucks having to go back in and undo all those custom snippets for each product when a promo ends.
The Promotions functionality for the front-end, in terms of customer engagement, still sucks big time imo.
I'm not cynical about the software and I'm not criticizing CS-Cart. CS-Cart customers need to understand that it used to cost US$100,000.00+ to build an online store - and it wouldn't have been as good as CS-Cart software is.
One of my primary reasons for choosing CS-Cart for eCommerce software is the wide variety of promotions that are built in. The Cart Promotions in particular have just about every practical provision a retailer would need (with the glaring exception of a configured BOGO bonus).
Customers respond to smart promotions - but only if they know they exist. Try advertising promotions directly where they are going to be applied… and oh boy are you in for a lot of work.
The Products Location and Category Location in the Block Manager can have so many disabled banner blocks, that are actively advertising individual promotions on one product or one category, that it's difficult to manage. Setting an expiration date for the promotion does nothing to stop a banner advertising the promotion from showing, since neither the banner, nor the banner block, have a corresponding expiration date. Most of my product promotions keep running until the promotional inventory has been exhausted anyway, so in most cases I don't even set an expiration date on a promotion.
The naming of the blocks can only do so much to identify what is what, I have to keep a spreadsheet!
All the pieces are in CS-Cart to provide an admin with the ability to run as many promotions as he can manage, but there is a need to simplify the placement of these promotions on the front-end. I understand that not all promotions are going to be able to be implemented in a Promotions Block - as not all Cart Promotions are specific to a product or category, but… for those that ARE, a Promotions Block has the potential to be a REAL time saver for any admin who REALLY uses CS-Cart Promotions.