Scenario: I have to set up 10 different promotions that apply to the same 55 products (for coupling reasons). The 55 products are not already part of a department, brand, or anything else you can run a promo on. They are in a product category though.
Which is better for checkout speed:
Sort products by product category, and either export/import or open each, and give them a department. Run the promos on ‘select departments’.
Within each promo, choose ‘select products’, filter by the product category, and check 55 boxes each.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, if you had long lists of individual products it would make the promos not work well, and sometimes crash. They seem to have solved that problem. So I’m not sure there is much difference. What do you feel like doing?
Using product categories for grouping in promos is a bad idea unless you know exactly what you are doing, because the promo is applied only if the product is added to the cart from that category page. If you navigate directly to the product and add, or add from a different category page, no promo.
It seems like it would take less time from a user standpoint, and less room in a database, to just change “product category” to work like “departments” with regard to promotions… I know it’s a feature request.
Of these two scenarios, I think setting up departments is the easier of the two on my end if they are equal in checkout speed.
Departments work if you don’t otherwise care about departments. I actually use them to organize stuff so making temporary departments for promos is kind of a non starter for me.
I needed to put a bunch of clothing on sale recently and it was just better for all concerned for me to go to the trouble to spell them all out by SKU. There were several hundred on the list and I noticed no performance issues.
Product categories have worked that way since the beginning of time at Vin65. Apparently an early client wanted it to work that way.
