So you have been giving discounts on your nopCommerce stores. Other than raising the interests of your customers and generating more sales (in terms of quantity, not necessarilly in terms of total sales amount), you are not getting any other benefits.
But you could have done it anyway! How about giving discount in exchange of social mentions of your store? In this way, not only are you getting social referrals, you are also improving your stores' Search Engine Optimization (yes, social mention is accounted for SEO these days)!
Enter Pmints Discount - Social Discount Plugin. Pmints Discount is an nopCommerce discount plugin that allows you to give discounts to your customers after they've shared your website on their social networks. The actual sharing mechanism is provided by Pmints. Currently supported social networks include Facebook and Twitter.
Pmints Discount essentially integrates nopCommerce's "discount requirement" mechanism with Pmints. In other words, the plugin works along nicely with nopCommerce's "discounts" feature, and you can add "shared on Pmints" rule to any discount on your nopCommerce stores! In this way, the discount will only be available after your customers have shared your website on their social networks.
But how can you get the most of the Pmints Discount plugin? Read on to learn more!
Setting Up
First thing first. Before you can enjoy the social mentions for your stores, make sure you download a copy of Pmints Discount plugin. Once downloaded, extract the folder panoRazzi.PmintsDiscount to your website's Plugins folder.
Then, go into your store's Administrator Dashboard and visit Configurations -> Plugins. You should see a plugin that reads "Shared on Pmints". Install it, and go into the Configure plugin page. You should see a page like below.
Domain is the domain entered when you buy the plugin, while Product Key is given to you after your purchase. On the other hand, Pmints Campaign ID, Pmints API Public Key, Pmints API Private Key are the information given by Pmints when you registers and account on their website.
NOTE: Pmints is a tweet-to-pay service provider. It is used by Pmints Discount plugins to provide the main machenism.
When the plugin is properly setup, save the settings, and then proceed to set up the Discount Requirement of nopCommerce. Navigate to Promotions -> Discounts.
Then, proceed to add new discount, or edit existing discount. Once done, open the "Requirements" tab, and under "Add a new discount requirement", select "Shared on Pmints". Enter any desired numeric value for the "Validity Duration" field.
The "Validity Duration" value determines the number of minutes a social sharing is valid after the user has shared the status (through the plugin) on his social network. In other words, if he shares a message through the plugin on time X, he is eligible to get the corresponding discount within the next DURATION minutes after time X. If he didn't purchase within the specified Validity Duration, the discount rule will be deactivated, and he has to share the message again to reactivate the discount.
The last step of integration Pmints Discount is to actually display the link for users to share the message. To redirect your customers to Pmints to make the necessary sharings, just include the following link in a nice banner on any page:
http(s)://yourstore.xyz/panorazzi-pmintsdiscount-makerequest
If you are a developer, you can also trigger the Route programmatically by using:
Url.RouteUrl(“panoRazzi.PmintsDiscount.MakeRequest”)
Now that you've learnt the basic of Pmints Discount, let's see how we can use it to provide different discount scenarios on your nopCommerce stores!
Scenario 1 - Discount on Sub-total or Free Shipping
These are perhaps the most basic types of discount. With the Pmints Discount nopCommerce plugin, the customers are either given discounts on sub-total, or you can make the shipping free when they share your website on the social media.
To achieve this, add a new discount (or edit existing one), and select Assigned to order subtotal or Assigned to shipping. Then, set up the discount requirement as laid out in the previous section.
I like the "Assigned to shipping" option personally, as customers are usually very concerned about shipping fees. I believe most of the customers are more than willing to do so if they are able to get shipping for free just by sharing your website on their social networks.
Scenario 2 - Free Shipping on Certain Countries
Free shipping is nice, only when it does not impose too much costs on the business owners, like you or your clients. For shops that supports international shipping to overseas, free shipping is definitely not a good idea.
Luckily, nopCommerce's discount system is flexible to support the limitation of free shipping only to certain countries. Specifically, we can chain nopCommerce discount requirements, such that it reads "If X AND Y is activated, discount Z is available".
To apply discount requirements chaining, add Shared on Pmints discount requirement type to your new or existing discount. Refer to the section "Setting Up" if you have not already done so.
Then, add another discount requirement - Shipping country is - on top of the current one. So your discount looks something like:
In this way, you are able to specify a discount requirement that translate to: "If a customer has shared my side on Facebook or Twitter within the past 60 minutes, and that the order ships to the United States; he is able to enjoy discount X". Pretty awesome huh!
Scenario 3 - Free Shipping on Certain Products
How about providing free shipping only on certain products? No problem, just use "Assigned to product variants (SKUs)" like below.
Conclusion
nopCommerce supports a very flexible system that allows the store owners to give various kind of discount to their customers. With the Pmints Discount plugin, store owners now enjoy huge benefits when they give discounts - by getting mentioned on various social networks, store owners now have one more reason to give discounts to their customers!
I am Woon Cherk, an