Large Quantity of Discounts

[jxs97s]

As part of a marketing campaign, I would like to offer a large quantity of vouchers to customers. Actinic can't do vouchers, so my plan is to create individual discounts of £xx and give each customer a discount code. Once the code is used once, I will manually delete the discount.

My problem is that it takes a while (maybe 45 seconds) to create each discount code. This is fine if you want a few but I need to upload hundreds. I don't have the time (or the attention threshold) to do this conventionally, so I'm looking for a way round this.

I've tried going into the database and adding the values in the relevant tables (Discounts and DiscountTrigers). However, Actinic seems to throw up errors on the next upload, even though the new records in the discount tables are exactly the same format as the existing ones. There also seem to be counters in Actinic for nID and these are not updated correctly.

Does anyone know how I can create a large number of discounts - hundreds or possibly thousands - easily? Ideally, I'd like some way of importing a .csv file.

Many thanks, James

[drink75]

This is another way round that we did after not coming up with a decent solution.
I presume you want so many discount codes in order to track sales per customer as in our case.
In the end we just created a new customer group and got people to register for an account (see pxx of Advanced user guide for this bit). Once registered they qualified for a certain discount only available to that group. In order to make this a oneoff discount we used a keycode but have since used the customer group to encourage return custom by advertising 20% off offers in our email marketing.
Not a solution to your problem but in my experience with Actinic, the more complicated the thing you want to do is, the less point there is in doing it.

[jxs97s]

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, we don't use accounts so we can't do this. The reason why I want lots of discount codes is so I can cancel the discount when it has been used, to prevent the person from using it again. If I didn't want this ability, I could create one discount code and send the same code to everyone. However, in order to prevent anyone using the discount code more than once, I need to be able to delete it once used.

I think the best way for me to do what I want is to create a spreadsheet of discounts, open the Actinic database in MS Access and import the new lines into the discount tables. However, the two problems I have are:

1) On upload, Actinic throws up errors
2) I think there are internal counters and these won't be adjusted.

Am I on the right track here??

Thanks, James

[Bruce]

James,

There are internal counters for different types of discounts. Can you tell us as to what exactly are the error messages you get on upload?

Kind regards,

[Guest]

Hi Dider,

1)Open "ActinicCatalog.mdb", edit the "Discounts" table ,just duplicate the record for that discount with the changes to the ID incremented by 1 (Note: No 2 discounts should have the same ID)

2)Second create this SQL

SELECT Discounts.nDiscountID, Discounts.sDescription, DiscountTriggers.*FROM Discounts LEFT JOIN DiscountTriggers ON Discounts.nDiscountID =
DiscountTriggers.nDiscountID;

And in here the discounts that don't have the trigger set will have empty fields so matter of using CTRL and (') to copy to the one above, after adding a new ID to the field (nID) and the same rules applied, increment by one and no duplicates should be created.