How do I implement buy one get one free offers online?...

A question for anyone out there that has an ecommerce system or the ability to take payments for products online at any rate.

How do you go about implementing the ability to have something like a buy one get one free offer?

I can see how you could manually create a "new" product in the database that has the item there twice for the same price which is a bit of a cheat, but is there a way of directly updating the information on the page that has a product that has the buy one get one free and automatically updates the payment information correctly so that you are only charged for one...

Re : How do I implement buy one get one free offers online?

Suggest talking to Tim or Dan (see their profiles or posts in the forums) for technical questions with regard to ecommerce integration etc.

Re : How do I implement buy one get one free offers online?

There are several ways to do this, depending on how your product database is structured and whether it contains the ability to add offers or if there is a separate table that stores offers.

You can simply have a look-up table of offers for instance that sees what the person has ordered and then applies the appropriate discounts or delivers the appropriate messages.

For instance let's say product X is on buy one get one free, then you could simply have an 'offers' field in the table that stores the details of product X and if that item is added to the cart then you pull through that message.

Then when someone buys that item for a second time you either set the price to zero or more usually you apply the full price then offers get taken off separately at the bottom, again through the script detecting offers in the basket and using simple if-then-else logic to process accordingly. This is quite simple for a scripter to develop and many ecommerce systems have this functionality built in as of course it is quite a popular request by ecommerce site owners.