Using the Products Limit feature

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.3.0
-- Joomla version -- : 3.9.21

I am not sure if this is the correct category to post this, as there isn't one that looks to fit this question.

I am looking to use the Products Limit feature of HikaShop and have a question.

In the documentation for the feature and the restrictions, it says the following for product and category:

Product : If you want restrict your filter to one or several products.
Category : Same idea than previous, but for one or several categories.

It clearly says both are for "one or several products". However, I can only ever add one product or category to those fields.

Is this by design and the documentation is wrong, or is the documentation right and I should be able to add multiple products and categories to those fields?

A little clarification on my questions.

I am managing some websites that are selling online courses. The courses are sold through Hikashop and then they are enrolled in the courses within Moodle through Joomdle.

I need to limit all courses on the website so that they can only be purchased once. If I choose a to limit to a quantity of 1 by a single category, they are only able to purchase one course in the whole category. This seems odd to me. I get it form one perspective, but I would think this is a pretty limited use case. There should be a switch in the setup of the limit so that it could be either one course out of the whole category OR one of each of the courses in the category. That isn't the case though.

At the moment, the only way I can see how to do what I need done is to add a separate limit for each and every product that represents a course. This is a huge pain, and turns into one more thing that could be missed when setting up a new course.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thank you for the information. I do have another question though. You said:

"Regarding your situation, note that if you don't select any category or any product, then the limit will apply to all of them."

I didn't know that, but it begs a question. After seeing how limits work when selecting a category, how would it work if I set the quantity to 1 and didn't choose a product or a category. Would it mean that all user are limited to only buying 1 product within the whole store? If so, that is a pretty ridiculous scenario and I can't imagine why you folks would design limits that way.

Please clarify how limits would work in that case, and maybe let me know how you intended this feature to work in general. At the moment, I am seeing a limited use for limits within Hikashop with how I am seeing it behaving.

I just performed a test, and not selecting any products or categories, does indeed apply the limit to all products in the store. However it did exactly what I suspected it would do.

Setting a limit of 1 for quantity limits the users to only being able to purchase a single product on the website.

This is pretty ridiculous. The use case I need, where a user in only able to purchase any one product only once is to me a basic thing, but with Hikashop seems to be difficult to achieve. I guess I don't understand why product limits was designed to be so, well, limited. Sorry for the pun.

I can only conceive of limited uses for the limits feature. So limited in fact that I don't understand why it was designed the way it is in the first place.

It looks like my only recourse would be to create a separate limit for each product in the store, which honestly is ridiculous as it is cumbersome to maintain. Or spend money to have a custom plugin developed to give me a feature that honestly should be part of the core of Hikashop, in my honest opinion.

I would like you folks to reconsider how you have limits designed to function. This to me is a huge issue within Hikashop as the feature and how it is implemented to function makes little sense.

I think you're missing something in the way you want to use it. Why not create an unpublished category called "limit number 1" and configure your limit to apply to that category only ? Then, you could add that category as a second category to the products on which you want the limit to apply regardless of where the products are in the tree of categories on your shop. That way, no need to create a limit for each product. You can easily add or remove a limit on a product, you can easily see the listing of the products on which the limit apply by going to the listing of products and selecting that category in your backend, and if you want to add / remove a bunch of products from a category to that limit, you can do it with a mass action using a filter on a category and an action to add / remove that unpublished category.

Since I need to have the limit set up to one purchase of a product forever, not just in an order, since it is a course that they are not allowed to purchase again, it looks like I am left with no solution except to create a limit for each product.

I know for a fact that I am not the only person that has needed this exact type of limit. There are many requests for that exact type of limit within the forums. None of them have any workable answers either, but most of them were before the products limit feature was released.

Again, I am surprised that you don't have a flag within the limits when choosing a category to have it work on ALL PRODUCTS or EACH PRODUCT. Since people besides me have asked about this feature going back to 2011-2012 I find it hard to believe that it isn't an available option.

I guess I have my answer though. There isn't an easy solution within HikaShop. I will need to do it the hard way.

Hello Nicolas,

is it possible in any way to limit that only one type of product can be added to the cart, but that several units of it can be purchased?
Let me explain, that there cannot be more than two different items in the cart, but several units can be ordered.
I know it's weird, but it would be very useful.


Thanks again Nicholas.

Yes, that would be the case, but only one product would be added to the cart. Between A, B, C only A or B or C. Only one product_code per cart, ... but being able to choose any quantity of that product.

Thsnks