Discount for advanced purchase

Hey @helgatheviking,

This is a great idea for an automated-style future feature; however, currently, the only way to do this, is to do it manually. Essentially, you would need to create 3 different price tickets: one for the ‘super-early-bird price’, one for the ‘early-bird price’, and one for the ‘standard price’. As you approach the kick off of the event, you could edit the ‘event area’ to use the appropriate level of pricing.

With that in mind, if you have a repeating event, this probably will not work for you, since changing the ticket price on the event area in OTCE alone, will change the price for every event using that event area. That being said, we do have an extension that could make this happen, even with multiple occurrences of the event. The GAMP (General Admission Multi Price) plugin allows you to setup multiple ‘pricing structures’ (or pricing templates) for the same event area. Those pricing structures can be assigned differently on an event by event basis.

With that extension, you could have 3 different pricing structures (as described above). Then as each event grows closer to the kick off date, simply flip the event manually over to the appropriate pricing structure. Doing so will only affect that one event, not all the events in the series. So if you do have that multiple occurrence scenario, you will overcome the issue of affecting events you did not want to affect on accident.

Hope this helps,
Loushou

Hi Loushou,

Thanks for the great reply. Manually having the host do this, isn’t appealing. I presume that with enough custom coding I could automate that. I definitely have the WooCommerce chops, I just need to spend a little more time with your code. However, I was thinking that your season pass plugin might be a better fit.

For example, an event could be $20, but a season pass could be 10 events for $100.. or $10/event. However, that is if I could find a way to prevent the coupon from being used for events that are less than X days in advance. I have already written a coupon-related plugin for WooCommerce so I know there’s a way to validate coupons based on products. Is each day’s ticket (for a repeating event) a separate product? Do you think this could work?

cheers,
-helga

Hey @helgatheviking,

Sorry for the late followup. To answer your first question “Is each day’s ticket (for a repeating event) a separate product…” that pretty much depends on how you set it up. In a perfect world, all the tickets for the same event, across multiple days, would be the same product, just with some extra product meta; however, if you wanted to make them separate products, you could use the GAMP plugin to pull it off pretty easily.

With that in mind, I don’t think that is the biggest thing you have to worry about here. You largest complication is a ‘rolling expiration date’ of the coupons validity, based on the event it is being used for, which is certainly not built in to our coupons extension,, but could be added with some work. Because of this, if you are going to use coupons, in my mind, you have two options really.

First, you could have a different coupon for each day of the event. This would provide you with the power to control when that one coupon expires, and you could set that to be like 14 days before the one event the coupon is good for (or whatever your early bird timeframe is). With our Coupons & Passes extension, you can also tell that coupon that it is only good for an event on a certain day. This has the obvious downside of having multiple coupons for early-bird access, which I think we can both agree is probably sub-optimal at best.

The only other way I see this working is if there was some code that handled this rolling expiration based on the event. I can say that this is certainly a great idea for a new feature of our Coupons & Passes extension, and because of that, I am adding it to the list of upcoming features for that extension. But, realistically, getting that feature added in there is not going to be something that is happening soon, simply because of a long list of other high demand features.

With that in mind, if you have the gumption and the means to put that code together on your own, by all means, I encourage you to do so. It sounds like a great feature, one that other people may not know that they need yet. It would augment the extra flexibility we already give with the Coupon & Passes extension, and it will definitely be included, eventually.

Here are a couple tips that could help you along the way:

– items in the cart have a piece of meta called ‘event_id’. that corresponds to the post_id of the specific event that the item is for
– each event has a piece of post_meta called ‘_start’ which is a mysql datetime stamp of the start time, as defined by the event configuration

Hope this helps, if you have not already figured it out,
Loushou

Loushou, that helps a lot! It sounds like both GAMP and Coupons could be extended to work with rolling expiration dates (of early tickets in GAMP’s case and valid coupon’s in Coupon and Passes’ case).

So in the cart you can just check _start post meta of the event ID and compare it against the current datetime stamp. In theory that doesn’t sound like it should be too hard. (Famous last words.) If Coupons is on Github and you wanted to add me to your repo with read access, I might take a crack at it and see if I couldn’t send you a PR. My username there is the same as here @helgatheviking

Hey @helgatheviking,

I have spoken with management, and we do have a policy in place where any of our customers who want read access to a git repo of a product that they own a license to, including GAMP and Coupons & Passes, can obtain that access by requesting it through email. If that is something that interests you, simply shoot us an email to [email protected], with a way of identifying your order, and what github account you want associated, and they will get it setup for you.

Hope this helps,
Loushou