Magento Free Samples Solution

A few months ago I was tasked with creating a free samples feature for magento – of every product. Now this is a little tricky as all of the cart functionality needed to stay alive for the actual purchase of the products.

I came up with something of a little hack that suited both myself and the client and also the customer.

Basically the way I went around creating a free sample feature was to charge the customer – weird huh? The problem was the client wanted to charge for postage and packaging anyway so the addition of 1p per product didn’t seem all that bad.

The simple fact of the matter is that it worked. I received a few email notifications of sample purchases that have turned into full purchases. For example one customer bought 5 lots of samples of the same type of tile. 3 days later after delivery of the sample 10cmx10cm tiles the same customer went back on to the website and bought £650 worth of two of those samples.

For me, this justifies the slight headache that was the free samples solution. The solution that I am going to show you now…

1. Create a file called getSample.php and place it in your home directory.

2. Paste in the following code:

require_once 'app/Mage.php';
Mage::app();

$name = $_POST['name'];
// instatiate Product
$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product');
setSku($name.rand());
$product->setName("Free Sample Of ".$name);
$product->setDescription("Free Sample of ".$name);
$product->setShortDescription($name." - Sample");
$product->setPrice(00.01);
$product->setTypeId('simple');
$product->setAttributeSetId(3); // need to look this up
$product->setCategoryIds("0"); // need to look these up
$product->setWeight(0.000);
$product->setTaxClassId(2); // taxable goods
$product->setVisibility(4); // catalog, search
$product->setStatus(1); // enabled
// assign product to the default website
$product->setWebsiteIds(array(Mage::app()->getStore(true)->getWebsite()->getId())); 

// get product's general info such price, status, description
$stockData = $product->getStockData();

// update stock data using new data
$stockData['qty'] = 5;
$stockData['is_in_stock'] = 1;
$stockData['manage_stock'] = 1;
$stockData['max_sale_qty'] = 5;

// then set product's stock data to update
$product->setStockData($stockData);

// call save() method to save your product with updated data
$product->save();
header("Location: /checkout/cart/add/product/".$product->getId()."/"); 

?>

To explain the above code:

- We pass the name attribute across via post

- We make a connection to magento

- We create a new product giving the SKU (as it needs to be unique) a name of productname+a random 10-digit number (e.g Isadore Floral White on Black 24.8×39.81418705824)

- We then set the price as 1p and the weight as 0

- We then fill out the other attributes and save the product

- We then use this new product and direct magento to the add to cart feature using the id of our brand new dynamically created product

3. Create a small form wherever you want the free sample button to be placed. I put it on the product list page (app>design>frontend>default>theme>catalog>product>view.phtml)

<form action="/getSample.php" method="post">

<input type="hidden" name="name" value="<?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_product->getName()) ?>" />

<input type="image" name="getsample" alt="Get Sample for <?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_product->getName()) ?>" src="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('images/freesample.gif') ?>" />

</form>

4. This form sends the product name (as that’s all the script needs) and creates the product – then sending the user to the shopping cart (as if they’ve added it to cart).

5. The last thing to do is then set the table rates for your shipping so that anything with a weight of exactly 0.000 has the required price.

This is by far not the cleanest method of doing a free sample but the fact that it works makes it worthwhile implementing. I’m always looking into cleaning up this code and perhaps making a module from it.

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