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I have a downloadable product that I want to give away free to specific customers but not to everyone.
To achieve this I created a coupon for 100% discount. When I test it, it zeros out the price — which is what I want — but then it sends the transaction to PayPal, who then responds that it needs a value greater than 0.
Is it possible for eStore to accept a 100% discount?
PayPal do not accept any transaction with price zero. So shopping cart won’t be able to submit any product to PayPal with price zero. If you want to give a product with 100% discount (i.e. for free) you can use the squeeze page type form. The following post will explain –
If you must use the shopping cart to give your products for free then instruct your customers to use the Manual checkout option of eStore. You can also check the “Redirect to Manual Checkout For Zero Amount Purchase” field from the payment gateway settings menu which will automatically redirect any $0.00 checkout to the manual/offline checkout.
There are many circumstances under which we want to download a product for free .. for 1 or more downloads of any product, for 1 particular product download, for a certain period of time etc. etc. The Store/Coupon system gives us this flexibility, but unless I’m getting it wrong, not the squeeze page option. (In our case, ALL products are eligible and we don’t want to do a custom page for each one of them). The manual checkout you discuss here seemed like the answer, but it’s not really workable with a Confirm Order form with all those mandatory fields – none of which apply to a digital product for free. Is there a way to bypass/customize that form?
Please have a look at this post and let me know if that helps:
https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/selling-items-for-00-giving-product-for-free
Option 1 is what we are trying – but that mandatory Confirm Order screen is not appropriate for a download free product. This is what we would like to bypass. Options 2-4 apply to particular products only and that is not our situation.
Yeah you can tweak the manual checkout form a little. The following post has a few links that maybe helpful for you:
https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/manual-checkout-form-mods
You could actually create a special page and use “Download Now” buttons on that page for some product (the ones you want to give for free). Then send your users to that page and they can download the items by clicking the buttons.
Perhaps it would be useful if I explain the requirement a little further. We have a membership site using eMember. Probably (I’m guessing) like many of your users, we have multiple membership levels and associated with those levels are various discounts on products. At the top level, our download products (audio files) are free. We produce about four audio files a week (we have hundreds) and all are eligible for free download. In addition, from time to time (often), we offer certain files for free to other members or membership levels as promotions. The Coupon system in eStore potentially gives us the flexibility we need to do all of this with a minimum of manual administration – which would be perfect except for that !**##!! Confirm Order form. (-: Hopefully you can see that as soon as we start talking about workarounds for a few specific products, we lose just about all of that flexibility.
It seems that this requirement was perhaps not considered when the zero cost procedure was designed. What we’d like to do is bypass that form altogether, and I’m hoping you can come up with a way to do that. In the meantime, today we’ll do some work on modifying it as you suggest to see if that gives us something temporarily workable.
Well we spent a few hours trying various things as suggested in various forum postings here. Nothing worked without errors – we were able to remove the fields but not the requirement for them to be entered. So we’re hoping you’ll come up with that bypass.
I can tell which which file to modify to remove the required fields check. you do want to collect the email address though right? So the plugin can send the email to that address with the link. So you will have only one field (the email address) in the manual checkout confirm page right?
Short answer – yes we need the email (we forgot that of course PayPal supplies that for paid orders). So we tried yesterday’s experiments again – this time successful except for Q1.
Q1 – We have set “the URL the customer will be redirected to after a successful payment as [http://www.theloaclub.com/thank-you/] but we got re-directed to the home page. Any thoughts?
Q2. The system did not prefill the email when I was signed in. Should it?
Also – the emails sent are inconsistent.
See [http://www.theloaclub.com/images/emails.jpg]
The first three resulted from a 1c PayPal order from [robin@marcate.com]
The last two resulted from a coupon applied to reduce the price to zero and ordered with an email of [robin@webhelpez.com]
The manual checkout takes most of the values from the following settings area:
WP eStore Settings -> Payment Gateway Settings -> Manual Checkout Settings
So, please fill in the “Return URL” field in the manual checkout settings area for your thank you page.
The email sent for manual checkout is also different from the automated gateway ones (a manual checkout process is different than the automated ones). There are a few different setup methods for manual checkout. The following post has explanation on these different setups:
1. OK – I fixed the re-direct to the thank-you page. Everything seems now to be working well. Thanks.
2. The link to those “different setup methods” above was one you gave me earlier and relates to either physical products or specific products – not our situation.
3. From above – Q2. The system did not pre-fill the email when I was signed in. Should it? (This refers to the email address to be entered by the purchaser to complete the order. If they are logged in to the site, should this be pre-filled?)
4. Some suggestions …
4.1 Unless we somehow persuade people to switch to manual checkout for free orders, after the coupon reduces price to zero, the “Checkout With PayPal” button remains as the order confirmation. Some people are going to be deterred by that. If feasible, it would be nice if the test for zero price was right after the coupon was accepted and the switch to manual was at that point.
4.2 I’m puzzled by the logic of the two order confirmation emails from the site admin email – (1) to my site notifications email address with Subject of “Here is the link for your free download” and (2) to the entered purchaser email with Subject of “Thank you for the purchase”.
okay good to hear that you sorted it out
Yes, the email address should auto fill given the user is logged into the site as an eMember user (you are using eMember on this site?).
The main issue is that the manual checkout wasn’t designed for the purpose you are currently using it for. So yeah it definitely has some lacking. The best way to handle this would be to develop a custom solution (maybe via an addon) tailored for this setup scenario. That way you won’t need to do too many tweaks and workarounds.
You can replace the default “checkout with PayPal” button image with a generic checkout button image. That way, the checkout button will just say something like “secure checkout”.
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