Offering free digital downloads with a product?

[mbailey]

I have a customer that wants to sell an MP3 player and give a specific number of digital downloads free when purchased. What would be the best way to set it up? Ideally I am looking to suggest a completely automated method. The way I see it there are a couple of main ways to do it:

1. Set up a product group for the music files and offer a discount for all products in that group when the MP3 player is purchased
2. Manually provide a gift voucher offering X number of items within the group free.

Are there any other options?

Martin Bailey

[jont]

Hi Martin,

may be worth integrating the 2 systems as the choice of downloading now is great if you are buying the MP3 player for yourself and the gift voucher option would be suited for buying the player as a gift for someone else and it gives them the ability to select their own music. With the later maybe incorporate a physical gift card with the player detailing the site and the voucher scheme. This could be extended to also offer discounts on accessories for their new gift... anything to get them to spend more

[Tim Weaver]

Could you also set up the free DDs as optional components to the MP3 player, refer the components to the DD products themselves, but override the price to zero? That way the DD products would only be free when purchases as add-ons to the MP3 player.

[mbailey]

Not sure this would work. There could be several hundred downloads, of which they can have a set number (say 8) free of charge. How can you make it so that they can only have up to 8 free of charge?

[Tim Weaver]

How about if you provided a gift voucher as a non-optional digital download component of the MP3 player, so that when purchasing the MP3 player they are automatically sent the URL of the voucher that they can download and use to get money off their subsequent selections (equivalent to 8 free ones)?