Membership discounts live
After much much much work we finally enabled membership discounts on our online store, shophousingworks.com today. The feature give advocate level and above members 10% off everything they buy from us online.
While this feature might sound simple at first it was complicated because it involved a merging of our customer lists in shophousingworks.com database with our donor database in salesforce.com. This opens the door to all sorts of things next including allowing donors to see all their donation histories online, update there email and phone number, and eventually renew their memberships and even send them as gifts to there friends, with all the data safely tucked away in salesforce.com.
Along the way we discovered about 30,000 user accounts in shophousingworks.com that never purchased anything online and therefore never made it into salesforce and also never started getting our email newsletter, invites to events, nothing. This final dump almost doubled on online newsletter subscriber list which is now at around 50,000 for the thrift shop list alone!
Not bad…. next step is to eliminate the users table in shophousingworks.com all together. Currently all data is being saved in both systems but if we move bids into salesforce, then we can move members and eliminate the need for those tables in the sql database at all, and insuring all the really important information is in salesforce and readable and understandable by all the staff on the online store team
This also opens the door to start managing the emails coming from the system within salesforce.com as well. Managing them there makes them much easier to manage and would allow us to more easily put campaign specific messaging in these these emails since we can manage them all in one place.
Pretty cool stuff…
