Start Part 3 - Product Reviews, Set Attributes, Update Prices, URI Mapping
STCtoCart's remaining form buttons located at Options > Manual Update are not required. They are only features that I and other people that had input for STCtoZen wanted added to this software. Here they are in no particular order:
1. Update Prices
2. Set Attributes
3. Product Reviews
4. URI Mapping
#1 Update Prices should not be confused with the Home pages Profit Margin. Both of these items work different from each other. However with both of them working together you can get some surprising results that you might not have thought of. First off the Home page Profit Margin setting works only with the STC's Data Feed. It makes sure the existing Retail Price and Wholesale Price have enough profit to sell. The higher you set this profit the less number of products you will sell. A Profit Margin of 65% will reduce all feeds down to below 100 products. The reason this feature was added, is because 3 years ago there were some products in the data feeds that had a higher Wholesale price then the retail price. A 30 to 50% profit margin is the norm.
The Update Prices works only with the existing products in your shopping cart's data base. To adjust this button select the "Global Price Settings" at the Home page. This will give you a choice of Increasing the Retail Price, Increasing the Wholesale Price by a Percentage Rate or by a Flat Rate.
Here are just two different objectives you can accomplish with using Update Prices and the Profit Margin together.
Objective Sell all products at 50% above your wholesale price! <-- Set Profit Margin at 0%, Set Global Price Settings to Wholesale Price / Percentage 50%. This will give you the 50% profit you require for all salable products.
Objective Set a 25% Sale, but recoup that Sale Price! <-- Set Profit Margin to 50%, Set Global Price Settings to Retail Price / Percentage 27%, Set Zen / CRE Sale Maker to 25% sale for all categories. The net result is all products with at least 50% profit, showing a sale price of 25% off, but are actually selling for 2% above the normal retail listing. Sorry osCommerce users! OSC doesn't have Sale Maker out of the box, maybe a 3rd party module is available.
As you can see above creative use of the two can get amazing results. IMPORTANT! Please remember that changes to Global Price Settings are not immediate, you need to use the "Update Prices" button or wait for your cron job to run. The Home Profit Margin works during the "Create Database" button or cron job.
#2 Set Attributes button sets attributes based on the settings at Home Option Attributes. Since all the attributes do not alter the price, or require any user input. Then this script makes these attributes read-only for the Zen Cart database. CRE-Loaded doesn't have a read-only option, so I picked check box's to show the attributes. Rusty @ http://pleasureplaytoys.com has a fix for this! OSC2 only has select option for attributes, so there was no choice at all there.
#3 Product Reviews works with a simple on / off switch. The form button enters STC's own reviews for various products. These are really out of date reviews, so you may not want to use this feature.
#4 If you use Zen Cart with the 3rd party module Ceon URI Mapping for SEO links, then you will see this button available. For everyone else it's invisible. If you have this module, then this button would be the last one you use to ensure it updates the data table correctly.