Offers & prices: Lyceum
Updated
Why you sell an offer rather than the course, and what that saves you when prices change.
Content and selling are two things
The course is the content. The offer is what you charge for it: price, access duration, which courses are included. That separation sounds academic and saves real work day to day. You can sell the same course both time-limited and lifetime without duplicating it and maintaining it twice.
Change prices without changing the past
A price that changes never alters an order already placed. What someone paid stays in the order, even if the offer costs twice as much tomorrow.
Stop instead of delete
An offer can be deactivated. It then disappears from the catalogue, all purchases on it stay valid, and the course remains with its buyers. Deleting is not provided for: an order whose offer vanished would be a row without an origin.
Prices are computed in one place
Amounts run through the same calculation everywhere. That is why a price typed in the German way as 67,90 also lands in the database as 67.90 and not as 6790 or 6.79.