i need help with a pricing scheme

["kenshin" <kenshin@planetanime.com>]

Hello all,

I hope someone can help me with a problem i've been wrestling with for some
time now, but as of yet i have not been able to come up with an adaquate
solution.

I'm running minivend 3.12 (although i'll be glad to upgrade if it will help)
running on a solaris box (SunOS 5.7) and perl 5.005.

Here is the situation:
products in our database are divided by categories.  e.g. VHS, DVD, CD, etc.
I want to be able to discount various categories independent of each other.
e.g. all DVD is 20% off.  All VHS is 30% off. etc.

What i have so far:
Get the discounts in the basket and thru the check out is no problem.  I use
the [discount] tag and some if/then magic it all works like it should.

My problem:
I want those discounts to show up on other pages, i.e. flypage, results,
browse.

My current work around:
I have hard coded the regular price and discounted price in my products
database and if a discounted price exists then show it instead but with some
extra indication that the particular item is being discounted (e.g. the
price in red instead of black).

What i would like to do:
I would be nice if i could just check the category of the current item and
if it matches one that should be discounted to discount it and show the new
price.
I've tried this using minivend's if/then statements but i haven't been able
to make it work correctly.

I would like to do this using [perl] but i haven't been able to find any
examples that use perl's if/then in minivend so i'm not sure what would be
to correct way to approach it in this situation.

Any help would be appreciated.

thanks,
mike k.
kenshin@planetanime.com