how to offer discounts

I have a bookstore and I have clients that order frequently.

I have price discounts for some titles that apply to all
clients

I want to offer more discounts for frequent buyers.

I do not know on what bases and how to calculate what
discounts to offer and how often and on what basis.

can anyone with similar experience through me some advice?

thanks in advance

yes, there are many ways u can do it.

Its not must to offer cash discounts.

For frequent buyers, you can assign some ID/customer no/cards

so, every time they purchase something in your shop with thier ID/customer no/cards, you can assign certain percentage of discount with respect to the book they have purchased and you can add the amount as points in thier ID/customer no/cards.
ex: 0.5$--1 point
1$--2 points

you can then allow them to redeem the points for any book that costa equal to the points they have earned

advantages of this are

Buyers will make their friends/relatives to buy in ur shop with their card to increase the points
5 or 10 $ book that is redeemed for points would costs you only 3 or 6 $(cost price)

are you able to understand, what i have suggested u?
i am sorry for my poor english

You could add a field to your database for total orders. When it reaches a certain number (you need to test for it in your price calc servlet or whatever you're using). I would just base it on total number of orders, but If you want to base it on total $$ value ordered, you could do that too.

As others mentioned there are several ways to implement, here is my 2 cents ...

You can create 2 different levels, level 1 is your normal shoppers and level 2 you can associate all your frequent buyers. Now in your database where you store all your products level 1 gets 10% discount and level 2 gets 15-20% discount.... So when ur frequent buyers logs in they automatically see level 2 pricing which is 15-20% lesser than level 1 ....

If you have still have VIP customers then put them to level 3 and so on ... this way you can expand and still apply your discount rules across all your products easily ...

Just be sure you let them know they're getting discounted prices, for 2 reasons. 1) they'll love it and you'll be sure to keep them as customers, and 2) you won't have irate customers calling you to see why their friend got a better price.

well, what I am interested in is:

- a simple model
- a maximum discount which is direct related to the total profits I get from a particular client (I can do this, I know my costs and my profit with very good approximation for each particular order in real-time)

My question is: how to present this to client,
so that it has maximum effect. There are more
choices for this:

1. add a discount for each order - discount based on profit for that order
2. add a large discount once a month or some other period - discount based on profits calculated for previous orders
3. add a scoring system: for each order, client get a number of points which can use at will. number of points gained with each order is based on profit on that particular order.

Which system you think is more effective, in regards to attracting clients not only to buy from me, but to buy often.

Whatever you do, don't let your client know that you're making a lot of profit out of them! Think: when you buy something, only rarely will you consider how much of it is actual cost (i.e. to the seller) and how much seller's profit.

Clients regard seller's profit as an open plug-hole that lets cash out of their account in to the seller's account for nothing. So, if you have a system based on the profit you make out of the client, you may find they cotton on to this and go elsewhere because they think you've been fleecing them up to that point.

You can't enter in to a dialogue with them about why profit is justified. What you can do is enter in to a dialogue with them about how great a customer they are and how much you value them. That should be the basis on which the discount is calculated.

Well if you want to base it on profit, then it becomes fairly complex. You'll need to store much more info than an e-commerce site normally does, in it's orders table or customer table. You'll need to store retail price and wholesale price, and put the calculation of the difference between the 2 in your servlet or whatever your back end scripting method is.

I would suggest to setup a discount structure based on the total turnover, not the profit, that a customer makes in a fixed period of 3 months/6 months.

An example:
$0-$100 0% discount
$100-$250 5% discount
$250-$1000 10% discount

I have used this for one of my websites and this system will encourage customers to buy more from you to get the higher discount.

I hope that I explained this clear enough, if not please let me know.

regards,

Jack

My question is: you offer these discounts once for each order,
or accumulte the ammount for orders, so if say a client makes a 75$
order, then makes a 50$ one, he gets a 5% for the second or next order.

Is this discount enough?

Please note that since I sell books, and customers are used to purchase online for lower prices, I have discounts per product anyway, so addind one more
level of discount per order I am not sure this will boost motivation.

I am more interested in per client discounts in order to encourage them to purchase only from my site.

We accumulate the total amount ordered during the fixed period and the customer will receive the discount as he exceeds the amount needed to get the discount

You can send codes/coupons to regular or chosen customers, they then enter this code at checkout time and the discount is applied.
Godaddy take this route and it seems to work well.