Discounts based on Membership Status

I have certain products that customers can receive a discount on if they are a current member with us. In the database, the MemberStatus column is set to 1 for members, 0 for non-members.

A few questions:

1. how do I set/declare a MemberStatus variable upon login?

2. if they purchase membership through the shopping cart (which is one of our products), how do I get this MemberStatus column to be assigned a "1" value after the purchase is submitted? In other words, how do I check for the presence of a certain item (which is Membership) and subsequently apply an Update Record action?

3. how do I set the member discount in the shopping cart? Basically, it'll need to do like a "if MemberStatus = 1 AND ProdCatID = 4 then flat-rate discount is $20"

In order to set a member status variable you will need to set a session variable when the user logs in. You should set this variable to the value that is held in that column for the user. If you have Security Assist this would be done on the final page of the authenticate user server behavior. You would just give the variable a name and select the column that the value comes from.

When a user purchases a membership you just need to update the users record, you will set the member status column to a one. This can be done with a regular update server behavior.

To set the member discount in the shopping cart you can build a discount rule almost just like what you have described in the discounts tab of the cart object. To find out more info on this part you should visit the eCart support page. In the Solution Recipes and Archived Documentation are guides that discuss discounts and even a specific member discount guide. Here is a link to the eCart support page:

ecart/

Thanks Eric.
I was able to successfully check for Membership status, and i also finally figured out how to set the CatID as a session variable. But now I'm struggling with how to define the discount itself. In the Discount section of the eCart object I can check for memberStatus = 1 AND CatID = 12 (for example), but then when i apply the flat-fee discount of $20 it only does it once, whereas it should be multiplied by the number of CatID=12 items present in the cart. How do i write that up?

Also: how would i update the database (add a '1' to the VisitorBoughtMembership column) if a customer bought a membership package? I.e., how do I check for the presence of a specific item (Membership) present in the shopping cart before checkout?

For the discount rule I think you should use a different calculation for the amount. Instead of a flat rate you should multiply the quantity of the particular item times $20. This would look like this in the calculation portion of the discount rule:

Based on items with a specific value
Total of [quantity] where [CatID] has a value of
[12] [times] 20

You may need to adjust this if your columns differ from what I have put here. This should take the quantity of items where the CatID is 12 and multiply that times 20 for the total discount.

As for the update portion you would want to just put in a regular update server behavior probably on the checkout success page to ensure that the transaction has already gone through.

Once you have it on the page you will need to add some code to make it only occur if the membership item is in the cart like this:

<?php if($WA_eCart->InCart($itemID)){  ?>
the update server behavior goes here
<?php } ?>

You will need to update the code to match your cart name.