Coupon Design Question

[Michael Zornek]

I'm in the process of migrating my own custom rails store over to potion
store. While writing the importer I tried to grok the coupon design and am a
little confused.

In my own store I would create a coupon object and manually give it a "code"
(the string the user types in on the store to active the coupon) as well as
things like Max Usage Count and Discount Percent/Amount.

In Potion Store when I go to the Add Coupon in the admin section I'm asked
for:

# to Generate:
Promotion Code:
Description for Customer:
Product:
Discount Amount:
Use Limit:

When I fill in these details it generates a randomish string that is stored
in the Coupon object as coupon.

What is the "Promotion Code" used for? Why do we generate random strings for
the customer side? Aren't strings like "macworld2010" or "fireball2010" more
common? Why do we have a "Description for Customer" field? What do you use
this for besides as a generic "discount"?

I have no problem forking and making adjustments to fit my own needs but am
curious as to the design's original intent and reason.

Overall I do like the store. Seems like a good foundation for me to build
on.

~ Mike
--
Michael Zornek
Clickable Bliss
http://clickablebliss.com/

[Andy Kim]

Mike,

The coupon code is a randomly generated string by default, but you can change it to be whatever you want, albeit using SQL. The system can also handle percentage based coupons and dollar amount coupons, but it's also not exposed in the admin UI. I so rarely make coupons that I never went back to redo the admin interface for coupons.

The promotion code is a string that helps you determine what the coupon is. Think of it as the campaign code. It helps when coupon codes are random strings. For example, you might want to give out coupons for product Foo when a user buys Bar. In such case, you want to give out one use coupons with a random string as the coupon code.

The description for customer could be anything, really. I've given out coupons with descriptions such as "Coupon for Dave" or "Student discount."

Like I said, the coupon system is so weak because I almost never give out coupons. However, some people have improved the coupon user interface. You might want to search this list or look through github for forks.

- Andy Kim

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[dreamcat four]

Andy,

Is there any place for an official "unstable" branch where people
could merge all their new contributions into? It might be a good idea,
because (im guessing) its more valuable to existing store owners not
to break the tried and tested code.

Apart from this coupon feature, there was another guy who did some
Paypal support, and other useful stuff. And to make Potionstore 1.9
compatible, will have to come the near future too.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that you Andy might have the time or
inclination to keep up an unstable branch. But perhaps consider giving
a trusted contributor an access key / relevant github access right for
doing it on your PotionStore githib.

It would save some of this stuff getting lost and help keep the
community active around PotionStore. We all love it.

[Andy Kim]

It is going to be a while before I can work on the store again. So… If people wants to work on merging the various improvements out there, I'll set up an unstable branch and give them write access to it. After a quick glance, I see that people have worked on some cool stuff like charts using the canvas tag.

- Andy Kim