eStore – Increase product price after a certain date

[Veronica Kirchoff]

I’m trying to figure out the best way to accomplish the following:

We have a series of courses that cost a certain amount if you register more than 4 weeks before the start date, but they cost more if you register within 4 weeks of the start date.

I’ve seen a couple of similar questions in the forum, but neither of the solutions (using coupons or variations) works ideally for us.

I’ve tried using a coupon, but it requires that we set up a separate coupon code for each product (with different discount amounts and different expiry dates) and then either rely on the student to enter the coupon code at checkout (and if they forget, then we get a bunch of support calls and refund requests after the fact), or we have to set up an “add to cart” link manually, including the coupon code in the link itself, which is a bother considering the person who will be setting up products and creating the buttons on a regular basis is used to “clicking buttons,” not using any kind of code, HTML or otherwise.

It also requires that we use the Add to Cart button, which we didn’t want to do because it causes additional issues with cart abandonment and people “thinking” they’ve registered and secured their spot, but they really haven’t because they never completed checkout. So we’d like to use the Buy Now buttons so that people just click the button and go directly to the payment page without stopping at the shopping cart page first.

I also tried Variations, but again it requires the student to choose the correct option, and there’s nothing stopping them from selecting the “Early Registration” variation even after the deadline. So then they check out using the reduced price and we have to contact them after the fact to get them to pay the remainder.

It also causes some confusion in that we have to set it up with the variation being a negative amount (say, -$100 for the Early Registration variation), but the variation drop down box shows “Early [+ $-100.00]” which can cause people to think that they will be charged $100 extra if they don’t look closely, what with the + sign.

Is there any other way to accomplish this? We just need to have two different prices depending on whether the person buys the item before or after a certain date. I’ve seen this implemented on product launches and such, but they probably were NOT using this particular shopping cart plugin.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your time.

[admin]

Hi, Please take a look at the following dime sale addon and let me know if that will work for you:

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/ecommerce/wp-estore-dime-sale-and-time-sale-addon-plugin-2377

[Veronica Kirchoff]

That might work… But it would require that we manually calculate the number of hours between the posting date and four weeks before the course start date. I believe I’ll probably get some resistance from the client I’m building this site for, since we’re trying to implement this eStore/eMember system in order to SAVE their administrator from doing tedious, time wasting activities.

Any chance of of getting an extra field added to have the time-based increment happen on a specific date?

Thanks for your time!

[admin]

How many of these courses are we talking about?

Here is another idea:

Create two products with different prices for each course.

1) XYZ Course (before 4 weeks) – Price $50

2) XYZ Course (within 4 weeeks) – Price $70

Now, use the first product on your course page to start with. When the date is withing 4 weeks of the course start date, you can edit the landing page and switch the buy button with the 2nd product.

[Veronica Kirchoff]

There are 5 courses right now, with multiple payment buttons — one for single payment, one for installment plan (usually 3 payments), both for Members. Then there are two more payment buttons — single pay and multi-pay, but for non-members.

I’m using eMember to only show the Members buttons to people who are logged in, and only show the Non-Members buttons to people who are not logged in.

The courses all have different start dates and different lengths; some are held once a year for 9 months, others are held several times a year for 3 months, etc. So we would be adding another thing for the Administrator to manually track, which I’m supposed to be minimizing.

What would be the benefit of switching between the 2 Buy buttons as opposed to just manually changing the price of the product and using the same button?

And does the Dime Sale add-on come with the 30 days money-back guarantee like the eStore plugin does? If so, I may just buy it and see if I can have my WordPress/PHP guy change the code so it increments the price on a specific date instead of “every X number of hours.” he’s pretty good at making small tweaks, but I’m not sure if making a change like that would be within his abilities.

I won’t actually know if he’s capable of doing it until he gets a look at the code, and if he can’t change it then I won’t be able to use the add-on. I don’t want to be out $30 only to find out that we can’t use it.

Thanks for your time.

[admin]

Changing the price is also fine. I suggested the two different product approach because, in the back end, you will have record of who purchased which item.

It shouldn’t be too hard to change the dime sale addon to increase the product price on a certain date. Please fill in the following form to start the process:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/need-custom-work-done

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