Magento – Mail-In Rebates
Introduction
A Mail-In Rebate is a piece of paper that says “Buy this to Get $x Back!,” and provides a few rules of the program. This means there’s no real programming genius required, other than to provide a link to the rebate form and maybe relieve it from the site after it’s expired.
Doesn’t look like Magento has much in the way of managing Mail-In rebates (at least not yet), so I did some twiddling about today to see what we can do instead. My motto is always try to take the path of least resistance – it’s usually right. My gut reaction was to try an attribute.
And indeed, it did just what I wanted it to. Sorta.
Attribute “rebate_url”
I created an attribute called “rebate_url” :
| For internal use. Must be unique with no spaces | ||
| Declare attribute value saving scope | ||
| Not shared with other products | ||
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Frontend Properties
| Can be used only with catalog input type Dropdown, Multiple Select and Price | ||
| Position of attribute in layered navigation block | ||
In the Label/ Options Tab, I just added “Current Rebate(s)” as the Title in the Admin box. That’ll propogate forward (I’m an English-only store at present):
| Admin | English | French | German |
|---|---|---|---|
Add the rebate_url attribute to whichever set you need. Then, you’re ready to add to product.
Specifying the Rebate URL on the Product
I’d put the rebate_url into the “General” tab of my attribute set, and filled it in like this:
$25 Mail In Rebate! <a href=”pathToPDF”>Download Rebate Form</a> Expires Jan 31, 2012
Lo and behold, a link appears on the product’s detail page!
Problems
The most obvious problem to me is that we have no automated way to effectively manage expirating rebates. In my particular case I opted to use a shared Google Spreadsheet, with an Expiration Date field; I simply exported to csv to upload all of the rebates quickly.
Questions?
Drop me a line! Er, I mean, comment.
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