Everything you'd want to know before you install.
A detailed look at how Product Sample Ordering — Follow-up & Conversion Tracking (PrestaShop 8 & 9) works, why we built it the way we did, and the thinking behind the features above.
The purchase barrier that a sample removes
A paint shade, a foundation, an upholstery fabric, a fragrance: these are products people hesitate to order online because they cannot touch them, see them in real light or smell them. A sample removes that barrier. Provided you can offer it cleanly, without building a parallel catalogue, without having your stock drained by a handful of opportunists, and without losing sight of what the programme actually earns.
A hidden sample product, generated for you
You add a product to the programme from the back office, you enter a tax-included price, and the module handles the rest: it creates a sample product hidden from the catalogue, whose name is automatically prefixed and translated into your languages, with a dedicated SMPL reference, the VAT rate of the source product, the cover image reused and unlimited stock. That product is not visible in navigation or search: it is only reachable through the button on the product page. You duplicate nothing, you maintain nothing.
Limits that genuinely hold
A sample programme without guardrails gets drained within days. The module prevents the same sample from being added twice to a cart, caps the number of samples per cart, limits the number of samples of the same product per customer, and caps the total number of samples per customer over a rolling window you define. The button shows the reached state directly on the product page: the customer knows immediately where they stand, rather than being turned away at the cart.
Conversion, measured without guesswork
For every order containing a sample, the module records who received what and when. When that same customer orders again, the module marks the corresponding sample as converted, according to the mode you selected: only if the sampled product is bought, or as soon as any purchase is made. The dashboard shows samples ordered, conversions, conversion rate and the revenue generated by conversion orders. You finally know how much your sample programme brings in, and on which products it works.
The automatic follow-up that triggers the purchase
The sample is received, tested, appreciated — then forgotten. That is where the follow-up comes in. A few days after the sample order (14 by default), an email is sent automatically, in the customer's language, with the product name, a direct link to the page and, if you enable it, a unique discount voucher: customer-restricted code, single use, percentage based, valid for as many days as you choose. Emails are provided ready to use in French, English, Spanish, German and Italian. Customers who have already bought are of course never followed up.
Robust, framed, no surprises
Follow-ups run through a token-secured cron task, processed in batches of fifty, to be scheduled hourly. Cancelled orders and payment errors never trigger a follow-up; orders not yet paid are simply postponed to the next run. The module relies on ObjectModel and legacy controllers to work identically under PrestaShop 8 and 9, with no Symfony or Composer dependency, and alters no core file. On uninstall, tables, settings and the admin tab are removed, and sample products are deactivated rather than deleted, to preserve your order history.
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