Coupon Questions

[kris0516]

If I don't post this now... I will forget :-)



I run a Christmas Business (online), and this is my first year with E-Junkie (I'm happy).



So this year I have used coupon codes for my mailing list (for past customers and people who have never purchased before).



So basically I have run a call business, and my site has over 400 buttons (different children, times and date)... a lot of typing. So what I was trying to do (and I think I ended up doing it the long way) was create a 20% off discount for all my products except for Christmas Eve. Well, I really couldn't find a way to do that in the Coupon Menu. So I ended up going product by product and creating the discount.



So my first question is... Is there a way when creating a discount to exclude certain items?



So while doing the "long way" of creating discounts... I found that if I wanted to offer 20% off on certain products I can't enter a percent... it has to be a dollar amount. Which tends to be a lot of math.



So my next question is... Am I missing something with each product discount for a percent?



I know that I don't have to create that many buttons, I can use the variants for days/ times/ number of children. I have tried that in the past (few years ago), but it seemed to confuse some of the customers. I have everyone ordering to Grandparents that barely check their email to people that are internet savvy. So I have to make it easy for the "older" people! :-)



So I'm not really looking for a solution this year (as I only have 5 days left)... but more for next year so when I tweak my site... I know what direction I should be going in.



Thank you in advance for your help!



Kris

[E-junkie_Guru]

You can only create Discounts for All Cart Items (applied to the order total regardless of what items are in the order) or for particular products (takes a flat amount off the per-unit price of the specified product). There is no way to create a cart discount that doesn't "count" the price of certain items or which will not work if certain items are added to the order. Product-specific discounts cannot currently apply a percent-off; they can only markdown the per-unit price of that product.



You may be interested in this tutorial explaining how to turn a product with Variants into a series of separate buttons for each Variant combination:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.variants.button-tutorial.htm

[jwilker]

Since it's almost a year old thought I'd raise this issue up again.



Anything change here? Can I exclude certain items from discounts?

[E-junkie_Guru]

We have not changed Seller Admin since last August, so there have been no changes to our Discount options since then. However, our Development team is currently working on an all-new Seller Admin built in HTML, which will replace our current Flash-based Admin and include some new features, and this will allow us to introduce more new features and other improvements more readily and frequently in the future.

[jwilker]

ah nice! ETA?

[E-junkie_Guru]

Development has not divulged any ETA and keeps projects pretty close to their vest, but I'm under the impression that the new Admin is mostly done, just polishing off the rough edges, finalizing details, resolving a few loose ends and possibly waiting on a third-party or two to come through with necessary info or cooperation.

[jwilker]

Sweet. Anxiously awaiting!

[micah]

Wanted to follow up on this question about easily excluding specific items from discounts, this would be a REALLY nice feature to have.



Perhaps when you create or edit an item along with all the other check boxes at the beginning (Taxes/VAT, Variables, Single download etc.) there could be a box for "Exclude from discounts"?



This would be SUPER helpful in my opinion. For instance I mainly sell watch straps, but I also sell a few tools, I would like to be able to create a situation where a customer can get a 15% discount for ordering 3 watch straps but that discount would only be applied to the straps in their shopping cart, not any tools etc. added to the cart.



Currently I can only create a percent discount for the entire cart. My goal is to discount multiple strap purchases only, but I can't do it because a customer could buy one expensive strap and then several cheap tools and they will cross the cart item limit and the price limit and get the discount applied to the cart even though they only ordered one strap.



Plus I don't mind discounting straps, but I never want to discount tools because I sell them more as a convenience to my customers so I keep the prices low on them, a discount applied to them essentially erases my slim profit margin on those items.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Thanks for the suggestion; we'll put that on the wishlist for consideration as a possible new feature at some point in the future.



At present, you can create product-specific discounts that reduce the per-unit price of the item by a flat amount per unit, and you can make this dependent on a Min. Item Quantity threshold, but at present this can only work according line-item quantities of the same item in the cart, so different Variants of the same product would not count together to meet that required quantity -- e.g., a discount requiring Min. Item Qty. = 3 would work if the buyer has 3 of the same Variant for that item, but not if they had 3 different Variants of the item.



This help page explains more about our discount settings:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.discounts.htm

[micah]

Thanks guru, unfortunately that doesn't do me any good. My customers rarely if ever order multiples of the same item, let alone multiples of variations of the same item. I really need to be able to apply a discount to a category of items, or alternately, and I believe more realistically, simply exclude items as needed from having a discount applied to them under any circumstances.



Being able to exclude items from having any discount applied to them would be a very powerful tool IMO, hopefully we'll see it in the future.

[llmedia]

hello-

So just to be clear...I can't set a "percent" off on a single item, but I can make a percent off for the entire cart? So if currently I only have one item...i'm fine to do the entire cart, correct? I wonder why it's not allowed per item??

Thanks!

Lisa

[E-junkie_Guru]

Right, if you're only selling one item, you could just do a % discount for All Cart Items.



Item-specific discounts can only alter the per-unit price of an item, so in that case a % discount option would be redundant, since you can just figure what that % of the price is and enter that amount as the discount -- e.g., 25% off an item priced at $10.00 per unit would amount to $2.50 off each unit, so you'd create an item-specific discount of $2.50.



If you're only selling one product and don't need to use tax or shipping calculation, you might just use a Buy Now button, which bypasses the cart and takes the buyer directly to instant checkout for that one item. You can check a box on the Buy Now button codes page to get a version of the code that will allow buyers to enter an item-specific discount code, but that could not use all types of discount settings -- see here for details:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/faq.discounts.buy-now.htm