from each according ...

[john harding]

I have another outlandish idea to torment you with. We're toying with the notion of selling the digital download part of our output on the basis of voluntary donations, somewhat a la shareware - in other words, somebody who has no money or no credit card and wants to pinch the stuff could do so.

In Business I presume that implies that we price such products at zero. So far so good. Then we get to checkout. Here we would need to divide our customers into two streams - "make donation" and "download without donation". The "make donation" people type in the amount they want to donate and are then forwarded to the PSP, clear the credit card and get the download key (or however it's done) in the usual way.

The "download without donation" people bypass the PSP and get the download key anyway.

Also (because I can't bear to keep things simple) we are elsewhere on the site selling audio CDs, and these have significant marginal costs for us which we would prefer to recover on a more conventional basis. For these we would enter product prices at something more than zero, and want customers to go through the normal checkout process without being offered the option to get it for nothing.

Could any part of this be made to work, by some programming sage?

It has occurred to us that we could use the customer registration mechanism to allow different discounts, right up to 100%, but for reasons I won't bore you with, this doesn't appeal to us.

[NormanRouxel]

Why not have a product with a component and somepre-set donation choices (one of which is 0) and use permutations to set the prices to suit.

Alternatively:-

I have done some patches that allow you to overide the price of a product by filling in a field on the product page. This was initally done for an intranet site selling perishable products (flowers) where the delivery drivers were allowed to bargain a price for excess stock near the end of the day.

This could be used on your "donation-ware" type products but I'd need to add in some extra security (like only available on products with a particular CUSTOMVAR set) as it would allow a skilled hacker to override all product prices as it is at present.

Norman

[john harding]

Thanks, that looks promising. I wonder, though, what happens at the checkout stage to the person who donates nothing. I have this comic vision of WorldPay trying to get £0.00 out of somebody who doesn't have a credit card. Is there, or could there conceivably be, a mechanism by which the person who chooses zero automatically skips that and gets the download key?

Also, if we chose your second method - allowing the purchaser to change the price on the checkout page - am I right in thinking it could not be applied selectively, and that we'd have to let people buy CDs for nothing as well as downloads?

yrs

john harding
Ourtext

[Mike Hughes]

Couldn't you just make the 'donation' an optional component for the digital downloads. i.e. to make a donation, all they'd have to do is select the option box and then select the level of donation that they'd want to make from a drop down box.

I'd assume Actinic is clever enough to not make orders of £0.00 go to the PSP page. (I haven't checked this though).

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

Also, if we chose your second method - allowing the purchaser to change the price on the checkout page - am I right in thinking it could not be applied selectively, and that we'd have to let people buy CDs for nothing as well as downloads?

I'd link it to the presense of a Custom Property so if a product didn't have a Custom Property (say ALLOWOVERRIDE) then the entry field wouldn't appear on the Product page and the scripts would ignore any posted in attempt to spoogf that field. That should be secure enough for a live system.

I didn't need to do this on the previous system I did as the site was an Intranet and the owners were in charge of choosing to overrride all prices.

Norman

p.s. The other suggestion of using a permutation to suggest a list of donation values is free and easy to implement. Just try it and see what happens when you make a zero priced sale.

[john harding]

Thank you, these replies are very helpful.

I'm still drawn toward a solution that leaves the payment issue until checkout. I want the browsing process to be as free-flowing as possible. Because we need to display .pdfs, customers are already going to do a fair bit of darting in and out of Actinic, and if I can avoid their having to make decisions about payment each time, I think it would be good for everybody.

Maybe we should consider a non-technical solution to recovering CD costs - such as inviting donations for CD's at "not less than £x.xx". It would remain technically possible for customers to enter zero, and of course quite a few would do so. It would then be up to us whether we invited them to re-tender, or what. In this connection, can I assume that when we get the order it tells us how much the customer has paid?

yrs john harding
ourtext

[Jan]

If your total order cost is 0 Actinic uses the invoice with order payment method (even when it is not enabled) and the PSP pages are not presented, so maybe you could have a donation product link at checkout (as well as throughout the catalog at the product level) which allows people to add an item as described by Norman previously.

Regards,