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    Home > Converting Sales > Promotions

    Promotions

    From the Marketing menu, click Promotions.
    On the main promotions page, you will see a list of all the existing promotions, along with some basic information for each and the option to edit existing items (click a Promo Title to edit):

     

     

    Creating a Promotion

    Basic Promotion Details

    To add a new promotion, click the Add New button, and fill out the form:

     

     

    Field Name Description
    Promo Title The Title of the Promotion. Not viewable by customers.
    Promo Code The code is the value that customers will enter on the checkout page to use this coupon, like 'SpringSale2012', 'FreeShipping', etc - the coupon code.
    THIS CODE IS NOT CASE SENSITIVE, so it can be entered any way you like.
    Description The Description of the Promotion. Viewable by customers.
    Priority This is an integer value (1,2,3,42, etc). If all promotions are the same priority, all applicable promotions are applied. If you have multiple promotions that would normally apply, for example a priority '1' promotion and priority '2' promotion, the higher priority '1' promotion will be applied. NOTE: Priority 0 means that the promo can always be combined with any other promotion!
    Promo Status If set to Active, this promotion can be used. If not, the promotion cannot be used by any customer.
    Auto Applied If this is checked, the site will try to apply the promotion to every customer's cart. Those who qualify based on other restrictions (see below) will automatically get this discount.
    Discount Description Message This text will display next to each place your customer's discounts are shown. This should be something like 'You saved xx', 'Discount', etc.
    Product Discount Alert This value is used for auto-assigned promotions that use the 'Enable Product Requirement' rule (see below). Any products specified as valid for this promo will have this call to action text displayed on the product page, and on entity pages that contain those products. This value is defaulted to 'Special Offer!'. If the field is cleared out entirely, no call to action text will be displayed.

    Promotion Discounts

    After filling in the basic fields listed above, you'll need to setup the promo discount on the top of the right hand side of the form. Note that a promotion can contain both a discount on shipping and another discount type, but only one of the other types (indicated by the radio button selections below) can be chosen per promotion.

    Discount Shipping

    Discount Order

    Discount Applicable Line Items

    Gift With Purchase

    Promo Limits

    Once you've selected the discount type above, you can specify limits on the discount. These rules limit when the coupon will work, and how much of a discount can be given through the promotion. To limit which orders a promotion will apply to, see the Promo Requirements section below.

    Enable Start Date

    Enable Expiration Date

    Enable Maximum Number of Uses

     

    Promo Requirements

    The rules created in this section can restrict promotions to only work for certain customers, products, etc. Try to use as few of these restrictions as possible for each promotion, to limit confusion for your customers and staff.

    Enable Product Requirement

    Enable Category Requirement

    Enable Department Requirement

    Enable Manufacturer Requirement

    Enable Minimum Cart Subtotal Requirement

    Enable Email Address Requirement

    Enable Customer Level Requirement

    Enable Shipping State Requirement

    Enable Shipping Zip Code Requirement

    Enable Shipping Country Requirement

    Setup Customer Targeting

    The rules in this section set up restrictions based on what customers have bought in the past. These can be used to prevent customers from using a promotion more frequently than you want, while still allowing them to use the promo multiple times if it's been long enough (or they've purchased enough) to meet your requirements.

    For all of the rules below, to set up a promotion that doesn't expire just set the end date to a date far in the future. The start date can also be set in the past, to make these restrictions include historical orders.

    Enable Minimum Number of Past Orders

    Enable Past Orders Minimum Amount

    Enable Past Orders Minimum Number of Products

    Enable Past Orders Value of Products

    Notes

    Payment methods that take customers off of your site to pay (PayPal Express) have limited support for promotions. Since oftentimes your customer will leave the site to pay before they have logged in, the shopping cart doesn't have information like shipping addresses, customer levels, email addresses, and so on to know whether the promo code the customer tried to use is valid. Whenever possible we update orders later on in the process to re-validate promotion codes that were entered, but keep in mind that with offsite payment methods, some rule types simply will not work as reliably as when paying onsite. If you expect many of your customers to pay with those methods, you may want to limit your promotions to rules that do not require knowledge of the customer's address, email, order history, etc.

    Order-level and line-item-level promotions should not generally be used together. Order level discounts will be taken off of the base line item subtotal before any other discounts are applied, so you can end up with orders that are discounted more than desired. Use the Priority attribute on promotions to limit how many (and which) promos can be used on each order.

    PERFORMANCE NOTES

    There are site performance considerations to take into account when setting up and managing your promotions. The two main concerns are:

    • Number of active promotions
      • Promotions that have expired will not automatically deactivate themselves, and will need to be manually deactivated. Stores with large numbers such as 100+ of active promotions should review active promotions and deactivate all that aren't strictly necessary.
    •  Number of products assigned when product requirement is configured
      • A major increase in page load can occur, from around 2 to 30+ seconds, when an active promotion with a product requirement has around 100+ products assigned to it. We recommend product requirement to be used only when there are <20 products to assign to a promotion. A good workaround for this when multiple products should qualify is to assign those products to a new category (if they are not already in one that would cover it), and set a category requirement on the promotion instead.


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