Applying No Coupon & Specific Coupon to one Cart?

Question

****Update: I just disabled "No Coupon" and only applied the "Specific Coupon" and it is still applying the discount to excluded category 1298. This tells me that this is NOT the correct way to exclude a category? How do I correctly exclude a category for "line items"???

I have a "No Coupon" (or an auto applying 15% off coupon) that only applies to category (id) 1298. But I also have a "Specific Coupon" (or a 10% off coupon requiring a code) running where I have excluded category (id) 1298 but that the customer should also be able to apply to the same cart as other items may be eligible by certain brands.

This does not work though. If you put an item in your cart from category 1298 the auto 15% discount is correctly applied to category (id) 1298 items only BUT you can still apply the "Specific 10% Off Coupon" to category 1298 even though that category is excluded under conditions?!

Within the "Specific Coupon" I setup the following conditions under ACTIONS:

Apply the rule only to cart items matching the following conditions
If ALL of these conditions are TRUE:
Category is not 1298
Brand is not Nearly
Brand is not Fortan
Brand is not etc

Thank You for any help.

Answer 1

Reading your question, I'm unclear as to whether the "Category is not 1298" is listed under "conditions", "actions", or both. If you haven't already, test the coupon with that condition listed under only one or the other. I've found Magento can be finicky regarding which of those headings the conditions are described under.

Answer 2

Let's check the Websites and Customer Groups you've selected when setting up your shopping cart price rules. If you were logged in or use a checkout extension that logs you in after you tested this coupon, you might be in a different group. Another thing to do for your "no coupon" discount is set "Stop Further Rules Processing" to yes.

Answer 3

I FIGURED IT OUT! Don't drive yourself insane. Read This:

When you quick create "Associated Products" (or simple products) within a Configurable those associated products are not put into categories. Therefore, any Categories rules you setup in "Shopping Cart Price Rules" will not apply to those configurables unless you go back and manually categorize it's associated products.

Magento should consider integrating category placement into the "Quick Create" Simple Products feature to prevent this senseless workload. Here is the answer by (KGW) on stackexchange that help me solve this.

Exclude Promotion Price Rules from a Category

Thanks.