Price depending on where customer comes from

[kratzi]

Hi,

I would like to boost my shop a bit and thought it would be very helpful to show different prices depending on where the customer came from.

Imagine your customer comes through a price comparsion site and you show lower prices than f.e. if the customer came either directly or through a search engine.

The method is called dynamic pricing.

So far I have found 3 different approaches how this can be done.

1. By using cookies. If a customer comes thorugh lets say comparsion site you set a cookie. I think this is done by using something like "&utm=comparsion_site" in the url. Most likely the system understands where the customer came from, sets a cookie and shows a different price.
2. Another solution is to set up few shops. www.your-shop.com, www1.your-shop.com, www2.your-shop.com, www3.your-shop.com - This I guess is the easiest way however very time consuming as one need to update prices in many shops and also set for every link a different shop.

For my taste I would like to implement the cookie type. It would be intereting to have a discussion how this could be solved best as I also think this could be interesting for more shop owners. Also how could this be solved in VM2.

Regards

kratzi

[GJC Web Design]

This idea has been asked of me a few times but always falls down on the fact there is no where natively to store different prices per product - no matter how you trigger it.
(often the suggestion is by language)
It would need quite a large extension to provide multiple "different " prices per product that also obey tax, discount, coupon and currency calculations

[kratzi]

So you mean the only solution for now would be to set up different shops like I described in solution 2.

For my taste this would not need to be a solution in VM backend. I would be also satisfied if I could upload a second pricelist via phpmyadmin. Then ask the visitor for the required cookie to show the different pricelist.

Of course the best extension would be to set prices by Operating system, webbrowser, if it came through google or a comparsion site etc.

Imagine how much an Apple user would be willing to pay more than a Ubuntu user who wants to have everything for free. Also this would be a perfect idea for sorting products. I could imagine that Apple user would buy different stuff than Ubuntu user. So why don't show these products first.

Regards

[GJC Web Design]

Everything is possible given enough effort, time and therefore money..
But all the theories fall down on the fact that the alternative prices HAVE to be stored "somewhere" and available to all the core VM processes to calculate taxes, discounts, coupons, shipping etc etc etc

And this will be a major coding effort especially if it is attempted as non core hacks

detecting where a customer comes from and showing him something different is the easy part..