Before moving my store to I was using a system with a very advanced "discount" setup. Hopefully this will be something the development team will work on as it's continuing to improve the great MC software.

One of there things I was able to do was to set a discount code that would give a customer who "placed an order over $50 free shipping on a specific shipping method".

Currently the discount control panel does not allow free shipping -However....

*This will require Custom shipping or Realtime/Custom shipping to be in use.

There are two ways to do this. If you presently have custom methods you may use your existing custom 'ground' shipping method. If you don't have one create a ship method called 'Free Ground Shipping'.

You'll want it set to go by 'Price' and then simply place in the 'low price' of $50 and high price of '$99999' with the shipping cost of '$0'.

Depending on how you do this you'll either modify your existing shipping method to give Free Shipping on orders over $50 (or any amount you choose) or you'll add a new shipping option which will give free shipping if the customer selects it (but will only appear when a order is over $50)

I'll try to help out in any way I can if you have any questions on this "How Do I..."

Any idea on how I would offer a Free Gift to potential customers who saw an ad placed in a local paper? Thay won't necessarily have to buy anything to receive the free gift. But once on my homepage I want to be able to take them directly to an area where they can choose 1 of 3 items pre-selected for their free gift, and not charge them for s/h.

Is it best / easiest if I generate a custom page as I would also like to ask them how they were referred to my site? Sort of like a way to track my advertising spending to see if it was worth it or not to do next year. Or is there a method in MC that would allow me to use the programming in order to accomplish this?

Thanks all!

Beverly

Couldn't you just created a custom .html page .com/specialgift? Then only use that page for your newspaper ad. Then you can guage the response verse the cost for an accurate ROI.

Captain, with this option, wouldn't Beverely have to put some God-awful link in her add like www.goddess.com/page.asp?id=46
? Using Custom pages, I don't see how she could get from www.../specialgift.htm to the custom page unless she used some kind of redirection code.

It would be great if we could give "proxy names' of some sort to these custom asp pages!

That's what I was tossing around - another custom page and possibly add on another email account or keep an existing email account and add a "subject" line, like "free gift" or whatever, and I could also track submissions for the free gifts from the ads.

Working with the software for a few months you'd think I'd have this squared away by now, but sometimes my brain fails me. Sheesh. But currently my storefront isn't my main mode of business - at least not yet, so I tend to forget about the inner workings of MC.

Thanks, Captain, for the added boost.

I have also been thinking about a pop up window, but we'll see how adventurous I am in developing this. I ahve until the middle of next month to do some tweeking.
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Robert,

In my ad for the local papers, they'll have the link to my website and I think I'll plan on designing a custom page specifically for the ad. They can go to my domain, then click on the link for the custom page and select their choice of a free gift. I tend to give out free gifts from time to time to my existing "face to face" customers, but as I am trying to develop my internet presence I am "hoping' that this will generate more traffic.

Best of luck and thanks!

Beverly
Goddess Enterprises

Dear Goddess,

I would love to hear how the promotion turns out. Like you, we have a retail store and an online presence.

Robert,

I'll let you know. The ad is for our State Fair goers and 'supposedly' it will reach in the area of 12,500+ people, so that was why I think it was important for me to track how many visitors I got from the ad. Being a one-person show it's hard to set aside the capital for advertising but thought this was a good venture as they will see my company as a "local". But I also realize that people come from out of state to attend our state fair as well.

I placed an expiration date of June 2004 (just before the start of the next fair date), and also limited it to one free gift per person; that's where I'll have to get moving on re-developing my database so I don't get duplicates.

How's business in your part of the world?

Beverly

Robert,

Sorry to confuse things... when I wrote custom pages, I meant an actual stand alone .html page outside of the framework of the store containing a form or whatever is needed. With a stand alone page you can create whatever look and feel you want and maintain an easy to remember URL.