Commerce Server Blog

In commerce server a promotion code can be used to associate a discount to an order. Promotion code can also know as coupon code. For example, a retailer can declare 20% discount on all his products with a promotion code = ’20OFF’ and the user while purchasing, enters this promotion code along with order then he will get 20% discount.
 
Promotion codes are of three types
1. Public – these coupons can be used by anyone.
2. Private – these coupon codes are targeted to specific users.
3. Restricted – these coupon codes are restricted to one user.
 
In the given scenario, if you would like to create a public promotion code and wants to impose that a user can use this code only once. Out of box commerce server doesn’t support this functionality. For public coupon codes, it will allow users to use public coupon codes as many times as they want – at the max the business uses can restrict the usage per basket. If the business requirement is restrict user to use public promotion code only once then here is the work around.
 
For that user, get all his previous purchase orders and check whether he has used the given promotion code. This approach will impact application response time. The other approach is to fetch the details directly from the database.
 
Select Count(*) from DiscountsApplied d
left outer join OrderForms o
on d.OrderGroupId = o.OrderGroupId
where PromoCode = ’20OFF’ and
promoUserIdentity = ‘ravi@ava.com’
 
The above code snippet, gives the count and if the count is greater than zero, we will warn the user the coupon code has expired.

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