Promotions system

Hi, I'm just looking for some feedback and advice on a promotions system my client wants to add to her ecommerce website.

Ok so my products table will contain a price field (I was going to include a sale price field but maybe it's not required).

Basically the client what to create a promotion and say select a percentage discount and possibly apply it to all products or maybe by category. So I figured a promotions table that stores the percentage discount as a field, a category field for the category id and then 2 fields for start and end dates.

I guess on the front end pages there is a check to see if there is an active promotion running and then anywhere I am displaying product price I do a php calculation for the discounted price, I then store this as a session and use this session in all my ecart server behaviours. So I would need to do an IF statement to see if a discounted price exists then use that otherwise use the regular price in the ecart server behaviours?

What do you think of this? Is is straight forward enough, or do you think I am missing crucial logic that prevent my idea from working well on the website?
Chris

That sounds like a simple enough solution to me.

Too late ?

Hi Chris

Just noticed this post. If you are interested, here is a table structure I created to allow the client to manage their coupons in a database

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `tblcoupon` (
  `CouponID` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `CouponTypeID` smallint(6) NOT NULL,
  `CategoryID` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `CouponDescription` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `CouponCode` varchar(50) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
  `CouponAmount` double NOT NULL,
  `Threshold` decimal(6,2) NOT NULL,
  `ValidFrom` date NOT NULL,
  `ValidTo` date NOT NULL,
  `Active` tinyint(4) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`CouponID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=6 ;

--
-- Dumping data for table `tblcoupon`
--

INSERT INTO `tblcoupon` (`CouponID`, `CouponTypeID`, `CategoryID`, `CouponDescription`, `CouponCode`, `CouponAmount`, `Threshold`, `ValidFrom`, `ValidTo`, `Active`) VALUES
(1, 1, 0, '10% Discount', 'bananas', 0.1, 0.00, '2014-05-03', '2014-06-30', 1),
(2, 1, 0, '20% Discount', 'cheese', 0.2, 66.00, '2014-05-01', '2014-06-30', 1),
(3, 2, 0, '£5 Flat Rate Discount', 'flat', 5, 75.00, '2014-05-01', '2014-06-30', 1),
(4, 4, 1, '11% off Joy Line', 'joy', 0.11, 0.00, '2014-05-01', '2014-06-30', 1),
(5, 3, 0, 'Whole order for a pound', 'itsapound', 1, 0.00, '2014-05-02', '2014-09-04', 1);

To get it working, I just had a recordset on the cart page (or the one with the voucher form) and used the coupon code (and date parameters) as the recordset filter.
If I got a row returned, then i had a valid voucher code, so then I stored the relevant field values in session variables.
these session variables were used in the ecart object

Its a few years old now, but the concept is good

Hey, thank you for that. I already built a coupon system a while ago which does what I need. My new promotion system is going a step further and allowing the client to create discounted products on either a product by product basis or by category within a given timeframe :)