Promotion end date - weird behaviour

[cstrandell]

Hello there. 

Bear with me, because I am completely new with Magento although my background is technical. I have a customer who actually asked me how they should continue with their Magento project together with a Magento project house... obviously, the project has not gone smoothly. Also, I am having slight difficulties with the terminology, since the admin console is a mess with both Finnish and English mixed... and part of the terminology I refer to below is sadly translated by me back to English, so I may not always hit the right original term.

Anyway, my question goes like this. Under products, there is a pricing subsection and here, one of the fields in the from is promotion (or campaign) end date. What now bothers us is that for most products (some 250+) in our web shop, even for those that no promotions have been set, the promotion end date has all of a sudden been set to 11th April. Now my overall question is, what can cause this since no-one of the vendor side and no-one on the customer side acknowledges that anyone would have done anything with this field?

[nerol]

I have also seen this behaviour. Not the same dates but a free shipping promo was created to run from the 27th through the 31st of May. It was noticed on the 28th that it stopped working. Checking the promo, the date was changed to the 27th.

There was one other strange happening a week prior. A free shipping promo just stopped working. The dates and settings were fine. Recreating it, the new one worked. The old one never did again.

Any thoughts or directions to look in would be appreciated.

[Amasty]

Hi!

Have you applied any patches or updates?

Are you sure that no team member could set up the rules by mistake?

I would recommend to log all admins' actions taken on the site in order to find out which changes have been made in the admin panel and who's responsible for them. You can check out our Admin Actions Log extension for that or try something else.

[nerol]

Thanks for your reply.

We have your Admin Actions extension but it does not monitor the promotions. (We are also using your advanced promotions extension. And both are great extensions by the way.)

There were two patches applied about a week prior to the start of the issues (SUPEE-6285 and SUPEE-6482). Neither seem to have changed any files that would deal with the shopping cart promotions... and other than this post I can't find any complaints similar to this.

Aside from your advanced promotions extension I have one other promotion extension installed which adds a free gift to the cart but it has been installed for months and has not had any issues.

[Pronto]

If your backend is a mix of different language check out the dropdown in the lower left corner is interface language dropdown. Choose English (US) and you're good to go with original translations.

But now back to your original problem. Magento Category Price rules require that your Cron is configured correctly. There's actually pretty good (albeit confusing) explanation for that, but it largely boils down to the fact that if the system is unable to confirm once a day that campaign is still ongoing, it just switches it off. Cron makes sure that Magento receives this confirmation.

So make sure that your cron works and doesn't crash and you campaign should work as intended.