One user in TomatoCart community reported the following issue in the specials module:
If you press Start>Catalog>Specials>Add batch Specials and try to look for products in category, then all would work fine, But if you select subcategory (for example Printers & Scanners > HP) you will get empty result.
So I think there is some coding problem, so search look just for category name, but not sub-category, as Printers & Scanners would display all search results good, but Printers & Scanners > HP would display empty.

Batch Add In The Specials Module
Solution to make it work with sub-category
1. Download the batch add special pack
2. Decompress the package and copy the ‘admin’ directory into the TomatoCart root directory on your web server.

Batch Add Specials – Works
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