Coupons in IOS

Applies to: IOS

The Timestone Internet Ordering System (IOS) includes the ability to generate custom 'coupons' that can be used online to discount an order.

Key points

• Define customized coupon codes
• Use coupons to discount products by a fixed amount or percentage
• Optionally give the coupons an expiry date and minimum spend
• A 100% discount functions to bypass payment completely
• No limit to how many coupons can be defined

Connecting to the coupon admin page

Coupons are defined via a simple to use, secure web interface.

The URL to define coupons is http://your-site-name/admin/coupons where your-site-name is the name of your IOS site. The site demo.timestonesoftware.com would, for example, define coupons at:

http://demo.timestone.com.au/admin/coupons

Access to the coupons is protected by a username and password. These credentials are the same as those provided to you in order to gain sFTP access to your site.

Figure 1. The admin page where coupons are defined

Defining coupons

Defining coupon codes is simply a matter of giving the coupon a code and a discount amount either as a fixed amount or a percentage of the order. The coupon can optionally also be given an expiry date and a minimum spend amount before the coupon is applied.

Note percentage discounts are only applied to the value of the products in the cart - they are not applied to tax and postage fees.

100% discount (bypass payment) codes

A coupon defined with a 100% discount (and no other parameters) acts to completely bypass the payment gateway. Such a coupon is very popular for internal use where staff can enter orders into IOS without payment.

Expiry date

To avoid confusion and variation as to how dates are handled from browser to browser, it is highly recommended the expiry date be entered in the international format yyyy-mm-dd. Note it is also possible to enter an expiry time by entering a T: followed by the time in the 24 hour clock format.

Example: To expire a coupon at 5pm on the 5th of October 2016 enter the expiry date as 2016-10-05 T:17:00

Applying the coupon code

The coupon is entered as the final step of the checkout page of IOS

Figure 2. Applying the coupon 'disc50' to the order

Try it yourself

For demonstration purposes the reader can define their own coupons and see how they are applied to our demo site.

Define the coupons at http://demo.timestone.com.au/admin/coupons.The username and password are both 'demo' (without quotes).

Use the coupons on our demo site http://demo.timestone.com.au with the shoot key FTTG8MTZ

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