In this tutorial example, we will create a 10% weekend sale for Saturday August 8th 2009 and Sunday August 9th for the Mice category of the default example ZenCart eCommerce site.

This is a timed sale, so we want it to automatically start at 12am and end at 12am at the appropriate day so that we don't have to set our alarm clocks to wake up and manually turn on the sale.

1. Before the sale, you see that there are two products in the Mice category -- the second product of which is already at a special price.

2. In ZenCart admin, go to "Catalog -> SalesMaker" and click the "New Sale" button.

3. As seen in the below picture, we give it an arbitrary sale name "Weekend Mice Sale" so that we can distinquish one sale from another if we have more than one sale.

4. Our sale is based on percentage, so select "Percent" in the deduction droplist and put in "10" for the deduction -- not "10%" and not "0.10".

5. Since we want to apply the sale to all products in the category regardless of their price range, we will leave "Products Pricerange" blank.

6. The second product in the category was already at a special price and we opt to not apply the sale to the product that is already special price discounted, so select "Ignore SaleCondition" for "If a Product is a Special".

7. For the "Start Date", click the drop arrow to open up the calendar picker and select August 8 as the start date of the sale. Note the server time shown in the top black menu bar of the ZenCart admin. This is the time of the webhost server in which you had installed your ZenCart site. (It may or may not be in the same time-zone as you are). When that time reaches 12 am in the morning of August 8, visitors to your site will see the new sale price. If you do not put a start date, the sale will start immediately after you click the "insert" button.

8. For the "End Date", we select August 10 (not August 9). We want the sale to be in effect the entire day of Sunday August 9. Therefore, sale will end the 12am the morning of August 10 -- the second right after midnight August 9. If you leave the end date blank, the sale will not end until you manual come back here and disable the sale.

9. Checkmark the "Mice" category for which the sale will be applied. If you checkmark a category that has subcategories, then the sale will be applied to the subcategories as well.

10. Click the "insert" button.

Note that Status shows red because sales is not in effect yet. When weekend comes, status will show green.

11. See that when the weekend comes, the sale is applied. Note that we had set option so that it does not applied to special priced items. That is why the second product's price remained the same as before.