Yeah it’s Thane West, lol… I had purchased thanewest.com once and never used it, but I always thought if I didn’t make it a personal website about me I could always market it as some sort of “hip” eCommerce site with “tha newest stuff” or something, hah.
For capping coupon use you’re kind of in a bind for that kind of functionality. The nature of giving members a global discount means you’d need a pretty hefty discount management plugin to handle all the potential variables – I’m not even sure there is such a plugin out there – or at least one I would trust.
I think the easiest thing would be to set up categories for each membership that the discount should apply to. For example:
Membership-1 gets 10% off storewide for products in category-1 and category-2, but only 5% off on category 3. So for products that have a lower profit margin you’d just assign the category-3 for that product in its “category selections”.
Does that make sense? I use categories on some sites to do different functions than they might be originally built for, for example on one site I have a special categorey called “download stats” – and I assign that category to all my downloadable products, I don’t use that category to help with navigation and it’s not in my sitemaps or navigation or anything – I purely use it to run reports every once in a while to see stats for sales for all products that have been given that sub-category.
The memberships plugin allows for setting up the discounts by category, so I think it should be easy for you to set up multiple tiers of “discount categories” (5% off, 10% off, 15% off, etc)… Then for each membership level add the appropriate categories as the “purchasing discounts”, from that point on all that’s needed to control how much of a discount a member would get is to assign the appropriate discount category to each product.
That’s pretty much the easiest way I see to reduce the discount for certain products regardless of membership level. As for the coupons, it will be up to the store owner to configure their coupons appropriately to insure they don’t lose money – like they can easily ‘exclude’ certain products from a global coupon, just like they can make a coupon only valid for a single product or category of product… So in your example scenario we can easily set item-2 to be discounted only to 18% by giving it a special category (we’ll call it “discount-18”) then applying that category to the membership config – and giving any products in that category an 18% discount… If the store owner publishes a coupon that’s say “global 10% off store wide” and they don’t want item-2 getting sold under cost – then they should exclude item-2 in the coupon config – even better, they could exclude the CATEGORY “discount-18” so any products in that category wouldn’t get the coupon discount.
It will require a bit of brains to configure the coupons on the part of the store owner, but it shouldn’t really be your problem – any client can create a coupon for 100% off + free shipping in their store, if a client does that and loses a ton of money it’s not your fault, lol… The same applies to this scenario – instead of trying to cap discounts you can just create the framework/method for building the memberships/products/discounts/coupons – then it’s up to your client to not go outside the boundaries of those rules with their coupon creation.
