Shopping cart price rule for child SKU of configurable products does not work

Question

Im trying un-sucessfully to get a shopping cart price rule to activate at checkout. OK what I am trying to accomplish is if you buy 2 of any of the SKU's listed "all SKU's are attribute choices of a configurable product if that is any help" the buyer will receive a 50% discount on the second bottle.

CONDITIONS If ALL of these conditions are TRUE : If total quantity equals or greater than 2 for a subselection of items in cart matching ANY of these conditions: SKU is one of SKU1, SKU2, SKU3

ACTION Percent of the Product Price Discounted 25 0, 0, NO NO NO for the rest

If ANY of these conditions are TRUE : SKU is one of SKU1, SKU2, SKU3

I have tried variation of this however nothing whatsoever happens on the checkout. Cron is active as I believe this has an affect on rules and all attribute choices have promo rules active. The coupon is also set to no coupon.

MY question is twofold. First can any see any glaringly obvious error in the setup as I was following the Magento price rules recipes which gives this exact instruction for setting up a similar rule. Secondly is there a way to step through or debug Magento rules as they are activated?

Thank in advance...

Answer 1

There is a bug in magento 1.7 and some earlier version with shopping cart rules and conditions.

The condition tab works perfectly, as it checks all cart items - child and parent.

But the action tab does not, as it checks only parent items and does not "see" child SKUs.

Possible workarounds:

1. Set action on configurable items only

2. Modify the input array of products for action check ( replace parent skus with the child) and restore it after the validation.

3. Some extensions for advanced shopping cart rules may have this bug fixed.