Hi
Is there a way to increase the invoice number generated for each order by 2’s instead of by 1’s?
Thanks in advance…
No, it is done by mySQL auto-increment.
Hello, cougar
Some code modifications are required to implement this feature. We would be happy to assist you in this matter within our technical support service. Please contact us via Customer Help Desk if you have support credits or an active support period.
[quote name=‘cougar’]Hi
Is there a way to increase the invoice number generated for each order by 2’s instead of by 1’s?
Thanks in advance…[/QUOTE]
It is funny, you will fake your order count… It can be helpfull, yes… 
[quote]
Some code modifications are required to implement this feature. We would be happy to assist you in this matter within our technical support service. Please contact us via Customer Help Desk if you have support credits or an active support period.
[/quote]
I think it’s pretty inappropriate for cs-cart to do direct sales in the forums here. Many developers can do custom work to solve people’s problems. However, any time we offer our services for that we get blasted. I restrict myself to offering products I have that will address a merchant’s problem. To have cs-cart recently start trolling the forums for custom development is a bit out of the theme of the forums (my two cents).
Of course this issue could be addressed by using the place_order hook and then incrementing the auto-increment value in the table each time an order is placed. But the user wanted to know how to do it (assuming in the cart admin) or for free from a “contributor” in the forums.
Have the rules changed about offering of consulting services here in the forum?
Tony,
Please let me explain the situation. Since recently we have expanded our technical support service. We monitor the forums now and reply to some posts. Unfortunately, it is not clear enough to us why you call our work here “trolling”. We provide some useful information to those who ask for help. But, as you know, our general support service is paid and we cannot offer full-range support through the forums. Also sometimes it is necessary to access a site to provide help. So in this cases we recommend CS-Cart owners contact our support team via our Customer Help Desk so we can investigate a problem on their server or make some code changes for support credits or within a support period. Please note that we do not offer our custom development service, just support.
If all of us who offered paid support were to tell people to contact us in each question there would:
- never be nay solutions in the forum
- it becomes an advertising medium
I appreciate that you are finally monitoring what goes on here. We begged for this for years. I think everyone knows that you offer paid support, just like they know I do, and others as well.
I have not seen anywhere that when you went off in “paid mode” with a question from a member here that you came back and posted the solution for others to find.
I would think the rules of the forum should apply to cs-cart as well as other developers. Obviously you have a huge amount of knowledge and direct access to the developers. So providing info here should be quite easy for you.
However, I would suggest that you not offer your paid development or support services here in the forum (as a response to threads other than the appropriate 3rd party threads) or it’s going to get messy. Most all of the rest of us abide by that. It would be quite easy for me to solicit directly here. But it has been against forum policy in the past. So I think you should abide by the same.
If you can provide an answer to a question or provide a link to documentation that answers a question, that’s great. But if you’re only going to say “contact us for paid support” then I think you should not address that particular thread. Maybe it’s just me, but when I get to things I can’t do, I contact you via my support account to help me. Many times I’ll post the question here first and if no satisfactory answer, I’ll go to my support account. Unfortunately, most of my question are more technical in nature and are not handled by support anyway…
It’s a fine line… It’s also a fine line when offering a product that addresses a particular solution. I try to be very cautious when I do that so as not to detract from the thread nor to be too blatant in advertising my products.
Think about what it would be like if every time a question comes up there are 5 developers telling them to contact them directly for support…
Just my two-cents.
tony
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]
Think about what it would be like if every time a question comes up there are 5 developers telling them to contact them directly for support…
Just my two-cents.
tony[/QUOTE]
then i wouldnt bother to open forum.cs-cart.com
just go straight to email tonybXx@ez-msXx.com
(remove the x)
[quote]
If all of us who offered paid support were to tell people to contact us in each question there would:
- never be nay solutions in the forum
- it becomes an advertising medium
[/quote]
Tony, thank you for letting us know your thoughts.
I believe, you exaggerate a bit. We offer our support service here in two cases:
- if a problem requires investigation on a server and we need access to it. I am not sure that CS-Cart forum users will easily give access to another forum member, but it is common practice for our support service.
- some code modifications need to be done, but no one has offered a solution yet.
And we do not force CS-Cart owners to contact us, we just offer a possible way.
For example, only one reply had been in this particular thread before we answered there. It was “no” and it was from you. Our reply was “yes, that is possible and some code modifications are required for this”. Without our answer anyone who reads the question and only your answer would think that the mentioned modification is impossible in CS-Cart. But everything is possible in CS-Cart because it is the open-source software. And this modification is cheap or even free if we are talking about the support service included in each CS-Cart license.
[quote]
I appreciate that you are finally monitoring what goes on here. We begged for this for years. I think everyone knows that you offer paid support, just like they know I do, and others as well.
[/quote]
Unfortunately, it is not so sometimes. There are a lot of posts from new CS-Cart users here and most of them even have free support service, but just do not know that they can get help from us.
[quote]
I have not seen anywhere that when you went off in “paid mode” with a question from a member here that you came back and posted the solution for others to find.
[/quote]
You are right. We did not post the source code modifications that were made for some forum members who asked for them on these Forums first. It was not because we wanted to keep these changes in secret. Quite the contrary, we are happy to share any solutions with our clients. Take a look at our Knowledge Base (http://kb2.cs-cart.com) that currently has 294 articles that cover most of the questions a CS-Cart user can ask.
First of all, when we say here “our support team can do it for you”, it does not mean that this forum member will contact us. So, we do not do anything for him and cannot publish a solution. Then, if a forum member contacts us (he can do it in a day or in a month), he is served by some other support employee, not the one who asked him to contact support on the Forums. In most cases the customer will not let us know he was asked to contact support on the Forums (he will just ask his question), so our support team will not know the origin of the question, so the solution will not be published on the Forums. Finally, when our customer contacts us and says he came to us from the Forums, we may not know his forum name in order to find the appropriate thread (and it can be difficult even if we know his nickname - the delay between “contact support” and the actual contact can be huge). Now you know how it works internally. I repeat, we will be happy to share a solution if we have it and we know the appropriate thread.
[quote]
I would think the rules of the forum should apply to cs-cart as well as other developers. Obviously you have a huge amount of knowledge and direct access to the developers. So providing info here should be quite easy for you.
[/quote]
The main purpose of our forum work is to help our clients. We believe, it is better than unanswered questions. There are too many unanswered questions on the Forums. Before we say that our technical support can help (the CS-Cart support team is not a 3rd-party service), we note that code modifications are required. Forum members can choose any way - to change the code by
themselves, contact the native support service (I repeat, unfortunately, it is not evident to all CS-Cart owners that they have free support service and we invoke to use it) or hire a 3rd-party developer.
We do not consider our messages as advertising. The rules have not been changed, we are still against advertising of 3rd-party services on the forums which are not destined for this.
[quote]
However, I would suggest that you not offer your paid development or support services here in the forum (as a response to threads other than the appropriate 3rd party threads) or it’s going to get messy. Most all of the rest of us abide by that. It would be quite easy for me to solicit directly here. But it has been against forum policy in the past. So I think you should abide by the same.
If you can provide an answer to a question or provide a link to documentation that answers a question, that’s great. But if you’re only going to say “contact us for paid support” then I think you should not address that particular thread. Maybe it’s just me, but when I get to things I can’t do, I contact you via my support account to help me. Many times I’ll post the question here first and if no satisfactory answer, I’ll go to my support account. Unfortunately, most of my question are more technical in nature and are not handled by support anyway…
It’s a fine line… It’s also a fine line when offering a product that addresses a particular solution. I try to be very cautious when I do that so as not to detract from the thread nor to be too blatant in advertising my products.
Think about what it would be like if every time a question comes up there are 5 developers telling them to contact them directly for support…
Just my two-cents.
[/quote]
Thank you once again for sharing your opinion with us. In fact, I have nothing to add. All the questions have been already answered above.
The forum rules will be formalized and published soon in order that no questions regarding what is allowed on the Forums and what is not could be asked.
Thank you.
Uhm, when did you guys start offering free support?
I’m pretty sure you have to pay for either support days or support credits. Am I wrong about this? Maybe I just haven’t been on the helpdesk in a while.
Brandon
[QUOTE]the CS-Cart support team is not a 3rd-party service[/QUOTE] support desk is the entrance door for a custom paid service, so in the end, it really “act” like a 3rd-party.
[quote]is not evident to all CS-Cart owners that they have free support service and we invoke to use it[/quote]
You can’t call it free when is part of the paid license.
[quote]we are still against advertising of … services…the forums are not destined for this.[/quote]
to say “We would be happy to assist you in this matter within our technical support service. Please contact us via Customer Help Desk if you have support credits or an active support period”… it means the same as “there is service you’ve paid and you are not using it”, but also means “let me give you a quote for that in case you run out of credits”.
[quote name=‘colortone’]support desk is the entrance door for a custom paid service, so in the end, it really “act” like a 3rd-party.[/quote]
Except that CS-Cart is a “First Party”, provisioning the forum is in their (and the) communities best interests. Those whom don’t appreciate competition will be less enthused by their involvement.
[quote name=‘brandonvd’]Uhm, when did you guys start offering free support?
I’m pretty sure you have to pay for either support days or support credits. Am I wrong about this? Maybe I just haven’t been on the helpdesk in a while.
Brandon[/QUOTE]
Brandon,
Sorry for not being clear enough. I meant the folowing:
Each first commercial CS-Cart license is bundled with your choice of either 30 calendar days of free technical support or free support credits in your account. Additional CS-Cart licenses (starting from the second one) come with free support credits only. The amount of credits depends on the CS-Cart edition.
I kind of already knew how it worked. I was basically being a smart ass.
I know that the licenses come with support credits/days, but once those are up, you have to purchase more. To me, this isn’t exactly free.
@Jesse,
You are right, it is their forum, but in many ways it’s also our forum. If it weren’t for all of us being here offering free support then there wouldn’t be a forum at all and it would just be another help desk.
I personally don’t mind CS offering their services. I am not competing with them so it’s no sweat off of my back. I just get annoyed when everyone of their responses is about getting people to use their support instead of tossing out an idea or two.
One thread particular was the thread about adding the -OR- between payment methods. That was like a 2 second fix, but CS told the guy to contact their support. I’m all for CS making a few bucks in support, but for little things like that, they could just toss out a solution for everyone.
I will give them some credit though. It does seem like they did answer a couple of questions last night instead of trying to drum up more business.
Maybe I’m just a whiner, but it’s just nice to see some solutions here on the forum instead of a bunch of advertising.
Brandon
[quote name=‘brandonvd’]I will give them some credit though. It does seem like they did answer a couple of questions last night instead of trying to drum up more business.
Maybe I’m just a whiner, but it’s just nice to see some solutions here on the forum instead of a bunch of advertising.
Brandon[/quote]
I noticed this also
Thanks CS-Cart
Scott,
Are you talking about me being a whiner or CS actually giving some help?
Brandon
LOL
I think your whining was with good reason 
I’m sure this will sort itself out. Either it will become an extension of the helpdesk or it will die out and return to being a forum.
Not worth investing any more time in. If the elephant swings his trunk too much then it will be time to move along.