Store credit for sample purchase?

[chimerastudio]

I'm hoping someone may have worked out a solution to the problem we're facing and would be willing to share some tips.

We sell a product that usually requires a sample to be purchased prior to the sale of the primary product. Unfortunately, we have found that the samples
often become the products directly rather than lead to a regular sale. We plan to price our samples to be profitable as products themselves, but we still want to reward customers who eventually purchase the product itself. Most businesses do this by deducting part or all of the sample purchase from the sale of the product. Is there a way in 3dcart to do this less manually than checking a customer's order history for each sale?

Using the loyalty points and gift certificate seems like a logical solution, but is there a way to restrict a gift certificate to the purchase of items in certain categories? We do not want to allow our sample-only customers to use the point credits to buy more samples.

Another option would be to provide a discount for samples purchased in any order that includes a standard product. That would be a less preferred method as it does not match the business model that most businesses use for this situation.

Thanks in advance for any ideas

[TMS Clint]

Coupon Codes?

Have you considered using coupon codes? They can be restricted to a certain item or a price range or both. If the coupon ships with the sample, there shouldn't be a problem with people having the coupon or credit that shouldn't. Perhaps there's a more elegant option out there, but that's what jumps to my mind.

[chimerastudio]

Have you considered using coupon codes? They can be restricted to a certain item or a price range or both. If the coupon ships with the sample, there shouldn't be a problem with people having the coupon or credit that shouldn't. Perhaps there's a more elegant option out there, but that's what jumps to my mind.

I appreciate your suggestion. I had thought my only coupon code option was to make a coupon code that discounts any samples in an order as long as there are also full products in the order (although I haven't tried it yet). But I hadn't thought of including a coupon code as a physical inclusion in the shipped order. That may very well work for us.

Thanks for the insight!