I’m trying to figure out a way to offer an employee discount to internal employees and they can pick up their merchandise in our brick and mortar store/warehouse.
I can’t think of any good way to do this. Has anyone worked through this problem?
Unless you need this to be more a self serve process draft orders can work as it lets you enter custom shipping rates, e.g. free or none.
Draft orders are moot if you need to use the discount system for tracking as draft orders do not use discount codes only discount "adjustments". unless you use a clunky workaround turning abandoned carts with a discount code into draft orders.
Discount codes can’t be applied at checkout for orders created as draft order invoices. ~docs - create orders
If your in a situation where you just need a default free shipping available to employee-customer-accounts(ECA’s) but never non-employee-customer-accounts(NECA’s) you could try the weight trick
- make a free shipping rate that only applies to an unreasonable weight that no order would ever have like 10,000 lbs
- Then create a free utility product “employee discount” or “employee shipping” with it’s weight set to that unrealistic weight
- !Important modify theme to only show such a utility products to customer accounts tagged with something like “employee”,“employee-discount-eligible”,etc that designate an ECA.
- Remix the gift-wrapping customization so in the /cart ECA’s see a “This is an employee discounted order” they check
- Inform employees of the “employee shipping”/ “employee discount” product they need to add to the cart to checkout for in store pickup.
- optionally modify theme to make this product more apparent
- alternatively customize theme to automatically add that product on login for ECA carts missing that utility product
Beyond that it really depends on if your already using Local Pickup & Local Delivery, or if you are on a Shopify Plus plan letting you modify the checkout.liquid and use checkoutscripts.
Also with Plus you could use an expansion store as an employee shop if you want to move the problems to the backend instead of the frontend, or even repurpose the wholesale channel.
Without those two factors without an app the options are more restrictive and there will often still be shipping steps often with multiple rates just like normal customers deal with.
An employee “store” can be done simplest if your able to duplicate products, similar to a wholesale customization using customer tags ,and set them up like digital products by unchecking “This is a physical product”. Though if your duplicating products anyway a second more locked down store should just be considered. There’s also going a bit further and treating the whole thing as a digital redemption system so they are buying pseudo-gift cards and inventory is skipped until in-store fulfillment handles it but there can be problems with that approach if not careful in setup and testing.
With the duplicated product nonphysical-shipping method, items can be set to employee pricing by default, there’s no shipping step and you don’t have to manage discounts. But the tradeoffs are you have to keep inventory in sync between skus, and or possibly multilocation, or any knock on effects for things like ERP’s.
If you want to track discount usage then you’d want to keep the prices the same.
For a custom approach an app like usemechanic lets you script custom logic to generate draft orders for either review , or custom prices, custom shipping rates, and to then send to a ECA
https://tasks.mechanic.dev/create-a-draft-order-from-the-cart (remember no discount codes with this method)
Or sync inventory by sku https://usemechanic.com/task/sync-inventory-for-shared-skus
2 Likes
Hi @jamesder , I’m Neomi from the Rise.ai app,
We specialized in gift card & loyalty store credit solutions.
We offer employee recognition solution that can fit your needs,
Read more about it here and here
Checkout our listing page and feel free to contact me at [email removed]
1 Like