Free Item with Purchase

[Birdsafe]

Trying to configure some free items with minimum purchase -- but the customer has to physically add it to the cart. If I configure one using the Promotion Manager -- i.e., a free item with a $30 purchase, the item is automatically added to the cart without the customer even doing anythign. If I say that the item must be in the cart in the settings, it doesn't give the discount (dollar amount off -- $2.50 item with a $2.50 discount on $30 purchase).

Thanks

[Msgroaut]

I have something similar on my site. I don't now how to figure it so that a free item will automatically add to the cart but what I do is I have it appear as an offer by using the Promotion manager. As an "offer" the customer has the option to add it to their cart if they want it. I see no point in sending out free stuff if the customer really doesn't want it or has no use for it so I just have it as an "Offer" so the customer can add it to their cart if they want it. Feel free to take a look at how it appears on my site. The offer shows on the shopping cart page. You have to have at least $10 of merchandise for the offer to appear. You have to have an account to add items to your cart on my site but you are welcome to log in with my demo credentials. Demo log in is: [email protected] and the password is actually the word password. My site is www.gro-aut.com

I can let you know what I did if this is what you are looking for.

[toolsavvy]

I see no point in sending out free stuff if the customer really doesn't want it or has no use for it so I just have it as an "Offer" so the customer can add it to their cart if they want it.[/url]

No offense, but I disagree with your logic. But whatever floats your boat. I use a very high resolution on my 23" screen and your promotions were below the fold so I had to scroll to find them. Most consumers aren't going to do that. Isn't the whole point of "free samples" to get folks to try them so as to increase future sales? Personally, I would just send them. But I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just letting you know. This is from someone how has been in marketing or over a decade. If you want to increase sales by means of free samples, you need to give them the samples, not make them look for them and then decide if they want them. even if they can't use a particular sample you send them, they may know someone who can and then that person who uses your sample may become a new customer. I'm not trying to be rude or a "know it all" but this is just the truth about marketing and increasing sales with samples.

Also, I understand that you may have a reason for this, and that's OK, but as a shopper if I have to have an account just to add products to my cart, and therefore I see no add to cart button until I log in, I get confused and leave figuring that there must be a problem with the cart or the store owner must not want people to buy, at least at that point in time. Internet shoppers are very much in a hurry and easily get distracted and annoyed. They are also very fickle. You have to eliminate all things that make people want to leave your site as much as possible.

[Msgroaut]

toolsavvy I agree to what you are saying to some point. I actually agreed 100% until I did exactly what you said. I used to give them away for free but had to change that because I found that almost 100% of customers that I serve for the type of products I sale were only about getting what was free. The same customers would come back over and over again to get free samples and were not making purchases. In other words, they were using my hair care line for free so your logic may depend on the type of product that you sale or the group of customers that your product attracts. I was sending out hundreds of samples and the shipping cost just for doing that was really adding up let alone the cost to produce the samples for to have no return from it other than customers wanting more for free but as far as having to scroll down, that is a very good point. I may have to play with the site a little and see if I can figure out how to move the promotions up higher. Thanks for the feedback.

If there is a way to allow customers to add to the cart without being able to check out as a guest, please let me know. This would be the only reason why my store is set up that way (have to have an account to add to cart). I really need my customers to be registered so to reference back to orders when needed. When I had customers checking out as a guest, it was a big problem.

[Birdsafe]

msgroaut - how did you set up your offer? trying to get a similar thing, but I can't get it to work correctly.

[Msgroaut]

I set it up in Marketing > Promotion Manager. In Promotion Manager, in the promotion description, I made sure to have a link to the page where customers can make a selection if they desired. I used the following html below to create a link. I wanted my link to have color so that it will stand out more so I inserted the html for color but that is totally optional.

<a href="https://www.gro-aut.com/hair-growth-product-samples.html"><span style="color: rgb(86, 132, 178);">Select here</span></a> to add a sample.

Also in the Promotion Manager under Promotion rules, I set 'requires coupon' as no and I set the order amount minimum to 10 so that the offer will only appear on the shopping cart page automatically when the minimum has been met. $10 is what I wanted for the minimum, you can set this to whatever you want. Under Promotion Offers, I set the amount of the discount where in my case, it is 1.99 since all of my samples are the same price but you can set it of course to whatever fits your need by dollar amount or percentage.

I announce the offer at the top of my home page by using a free app through getsitecontrol.com. The installation is very easy. You simply copy and paste a short script into your site. They have directions on their site. They have paid options as well but I actually just signed up with them recently so I am testing it out for now. So far the free option seems to be all that I need.

Oh and you no longer have to log in to add to cart. I figured out how to allow the customer to add to cart and not be able to checkout as a guest. In the past for some reason I was not able to do this. I don't think I had the option back when I set my site up to make the password required or optional but now that I can require it, this prevents the add to cart guest checkout issue that I experienced in the past. Yay!