Scheduling Price Changes / Having Promotions Affect Price Field on Product Pages

[TMS Clint]

I don't know that I could put it any more succinctly than this user did on uservoice:
https://3dcart.uservoice.com/forums/...e-price-change

More and more of our vendors restrict us to a minimum advertised price. Some vendors have promotional periods where we are allowed to sell at a lower price for specific dates.

Rather than have us edit the price twice:
Once at the moment the promotion period begins
Then again changing it back at the moment the promotional period is over,

I would rather we be able to set the duration of the promotional price once.

EG have the product sell at normal price up to 8/31/15
Then have it automatically switch to a promotional price on 9/1/15
Then have it automatically switch to a normal price on 10/1/15

I could program it once anytime before the change started with the following data:
promo price
Promo start date
Promo stop date

If we are "not on top of promo pricing" our products are not competitive with other sites that offer the promo pricing.

Having this feature would also help when we get price increases, we could program the increase to kick in on a certain date and remain that way until we change it.

This would cut our price maintenance chores in half.

I've been struggling with this myself and in searching for possible solutions I tried using the Promotions function of 3DCart as it's easily schedule-able. But I can't get the change to reflect in the price and it looks like nobody has been able to figure it out in the last two years (as evidenced by this post).

Does anyone have a solution that doesn't involve writing a custom API?

PS - If you haven't logged into UserVoice to request new features for 3DCart, I urge you to do so. (and vote for the feature linked above ;) )

[massagestore]

Just voted TMS Clint - thank you for this post. This feature would be a TREMENDOUS feature. More and more products are going to MAP.. many have scheduled promotion periods.. and almost everything I carry has a scheduled price increase once / year. Fingers, Toes, Eyes, Signals crossed on this one..

[TMS Clint]

I'm going to attempt to hijack the daily deals to work for this purpose. This will not be a long-term solution, but it will be better than an accidental MAP violation.

[TMS Clint]

No dice. Here are reasons the Daily Deals Module won't work:

1. The Daily Deals Module has only 10 Deal Groups. That means scheduling a maximum of 10 changes.
2. All Deal Groups will be tied to the same duration. You set the duration (from 1 hour up to 30 days) and that is the duration for each Deal Group.
3. Scheduling a price change to "start" in the future will require pre-setting a filler item before it. Items cannot be in multiple deal groups, so you're looking at 10 filler items for 10 future price changes (again, 10 is the limit).

Does anyone know if other online cart solutions offer this functionality?