Birthday Discount

Documentation

Installation instructions

You can install extension using Extension Installer or manually. In the latter case unpack and upload all folders from "upload" directory to the root of your store. If there's install.xml file in the package, rename it to extension_name.ocmod.xml, replacing "extension_name" with extension's name (or any other name), and upload it to "system" folder. When upgrading from previous version simply rewrite all existing files. Refresh modifications cache from Extensions -> Modifications page (not needed if install.xml file is not included in the package).

Note for OpenCart 3 users

If you see "The directory is not allowed to be written to" error message, download OpenCart 3.0 Extension Installer Fix from this page and install it. Then install the main extension.

Note for OpenCart 2.0.X users

Sometimes OCMod inserts modification in multiple files, which are separated by "|" character in XML-file. On earlier OpenCart 2 versions a comma was used instead. To quickly fix this, open XML file (usually, install.xml) and replace all occurrences of "|" character with "," for "path" attribute in every applicable <file> element. Search for "<file path=" to quickly find and highlight all elements.

If after installation you have "Permission denied" issue when accessing Modules, Shipping, Payments, Order Totals (or any other) section of Extensions menu, remove "module", "shipping", "payment", "total" (or any other) folder from "admin/controller/extension" directory. Same for "admin/language/en-gb/extension" directory. For example ("module" should be removed from both paths):

admin/controller/extension/module
admin/language/en-gb/extension/module

Permissions

In some cases it is required to manually set permissions for installed extension. To do this go to System -> User Groups, find your group and select access/modify permissions for desired extension. You can find extension in permissions list by folder/filename pair (for example, marketing/acoupon).

Extension Setup

Go to Extensions -> Order Totals, find Birthday Discount and setup accordingly.

How to use

When enabled, customers will find Birth Date field in their profile, registration and return forms. Upon entering their birthdays, they'll become eligible for discount. You can set different discounts with different option sets to make your discounting more flexible.

General settings:

• License ID - You order number on OpenCart Marketplace or our site.
• Customer Groups - You can define two options for each group: Required (customers are required to enter birth date) and Can Change (customers can't change birth date later).
• Round By - Discount will be rounded to given value (e.g: if set to 10 - 271.52 will be rounded to 280).
• Add Name to Title - Group name will be added to total's title.
• Add Value to Title - Discount value (if in percent) will be added to total's title.
• Hide Total - Hide Birthday Discount total from the list and add its value to selected total.
• Total to Add - When Hide Total is enabled, discount value will be added to selected total.
• Add Info to Total - Additional information about discount will be added to selected total's title.
• Discounts Inactive With - Discounts will not be applied, if any of the selected payment, shipping methods or totals are active in current order.
• Check Version - Check for extension's new version. Disable, if settings page loading too slow.
• Stores - Extension's functionality will be limited to selected stores only.

How to add discounts

You can add an unlimited number of discounts for each customer group separately. Every discount has a few options:

• Customer Group - Applicable customer group.
• Value - Discount percent or fixed value (e.g.: 3%, -5%, 10, -20). Can not be empty.
• Days -  For how long discount stays available before and after actual birth date. Empty - only on birthday.
• Orders - Number of orders eligible for discount (recalculated every year). Empty - no limit.
• Subtotal - Minimum and maximum cart subtotal value to enable discount (e.g: 100, 200-500 etc). Empty - no limit.
• Age - Minimum and maximum age, when birth date is valid for discount (e.g: 18-100, 21-80 etc). Empty - no limit.

For example, you can have a 5% birthday discount for Default customer group, which will be available for 3 days and only if cart subtotal not less than 100 USD. Or 7% discount for the same Default customer group, which will be available for 2 days, only if car subtotal is between 100 and 300 USD and valid only for one order.

Notifications

If you want to attract more customers to your store, you can send them notifications about birthday discount. You can do this manually by clicking the Action Link in extension settings or setup a cron job on the same server, using the same action link. Make sure to setup and enable notifications first.

Notification options:

• Action Link - Link for your cron job (see below)
• Action Secret - Random number of characters for cron link to avoid false script executions.
• Emails Limit - How many emails should be sent per cycle. Useful to avoid being banned for spamming by hosting provider.
• Send Report - Cron job report will be sent to your main store email.
• Notify Customers - Quickly turn notification feature on/off.
• Notify Before - Before how may days to notify customers with upcoming birthdays.
• Recurring - Notifications will be sent to all matching customers on every run (No - only once a year).
• Subscribed Only - Only customers, who subscribed to newsletter, will receive emails for this reminder.
• HTML Email - Email will be sent in HTML format (No - in plain text)
• Discount text - Single discount text format for {discounts} tag in notification emails.
• Email Subject - Any subject for email notification.
• Email Message - Any text for email notification.

To setup cron job use Action Link from extension settings like this:

lynx -source 'http://yourstore.com/index.php?route=total/bdiscount/cron' > /dev/null

If Lynx is not installed or not properly working on your server, you can use wget command. See wget manual for correct command line.

How to add tags

To add any info about customer or birthday discount to message subject or body use tags: {tag_name}. Tag names should be typed strictly in Latin letters or they won't be processed!

Common tags:

• store_id - Your store ID.
• store_name - Your store name.
• store_url - Your store URL.
• store_telephone - Your store telephone.
• customer_id - Customer's ID.
• customer_group_id - Customer's group ID.
• customer_group - Customer's group name.
• firstname - Customer's first name.
• lastname - Customer's last name.
• telephone - Customer's phone number.
• fax - Customer's fax number.
• email - Customer's email.
• discounts - List of discounts, which are available for current customer group. Contains all info about all available discounts.

Tag processing algorithm is very simple and absolutely fail safe. First, the script will read all available fields from "customer" table: customer_id, firstname etc. Then it will take each field one by one and wrap its name in curly brackets {}, turning it into tag: {customer_id}, {firstname} etc. After that the script will search for tag in email text or comment and replace it with actual field value, if found.

If certain tag is not replaced with its value, there can be only two reasons: tag is not properly defined or there's no such field in given table. Most likely reason is wrong tag name, which can seem typed properly sometimes. For example, this tag name seems proper, but it's not: {firstnаme}. It has letter "a" typed in Cyrillic and thus will not be processed. Same can happen with other languages and keyboard layouts.

If you're having an issue with tag processing, check, that they all are typed correctly and in Latin letters only. There's no and can NOT be any other reason for tags not processing as expected besides two reasons mentioned above.

Additional information

• Do not overuse "Round by" feature. Setting it to wrong number will cause improper calculation of discount.
• If you want birthday discount to be applied to total sum, including shipping, voucher and all other possible fees and discounts, set "Sort order" option higher than any of them.