Introductory offers - another way ?

[skf]

I've think I've read all the various posts suggesting ways to use 'promotional codes' or similar incentives for new or special customers ( mainly using 'logins' etc. ), but we're going to be doing a LOT of different promotions to a LOT of different customer groups and this could get unwieldy.

Is there a way to set up a page or pages within Actinic Business v7 that a 'special' customer can access directly if we give them the right URL, that also links to the 'main' part of the shop ( so 'special' customers can also buy 'normal' products ), but does NOT appear in the navigation structure of the main shop ( so that 'normal' customers can't navigate to the special offers page ) ?

Any ideas much appreciated !

[Bruce]

Alan,

I would suggest taking a look in the Advanced Users Guide, download here. Look on page 61 for the articles 'Hiding Elements from Retail Customers, but Showing Them to ALL Registered Customers' and 'Preventing Retail Customers from Entering Certain Sections in your Store'. Youc an use the workaround to achieve you need. You can even show certain sections to only certain customer groups by using the Actinic XML tag <Actinic:SHOWFORPRICESCHEDULE Schedules="2">, where the schedule value can be amended to suite the customer group you want to display the section to.

Kind regards,

[Mike Hughes]

I create my own navigation menus by hand which makes it easy to create sections for specific offers that are only seen by those I send a link to.

Yes, others can find it if they run through all the links in the site map but that very rarely happens.

Of course in V8 I suspect you can quickly assign a variable to a section and then block that section from apearing in the navigation menus, but I can't think of a way of doing it automatically in V7.

Mike

PS. If you like scripting, then another way would be to have a form on the page that sends the input to a php (or asp) script that looks at the data and then redirects to a page based on the offer code input. This is just a cleaner way of getting customers to the right offer page.