How to offer value to your customers using Promotions in Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1

I hope you’re now an an expert at pricing using the Pricing & Promotions module in Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1. Now that you have the first piece of the puzzle in place, let’s have a look at the the second one- Promotions.

Promotions in Sitecore Commerce allow you to provide certain benefits and/or discounts to your customers with multiple levels of granularity.

A promotion can be applied to either the product level or to the cart.

Let’s setup some promotions to demonstrate this functionality.

Create a new Promotion Book

A Promotion Book is a collection of promotions, and similar to a Price Book, can be associated to one or more catalogs.

Open Pricing & Promotions from the Sitecore Launchpad. Create a new Promotion Book by clicking on the ‘Add’ button. Associate a catalog to the Promotion Book.

Add a Promotion

In the Promotions section on the Promotion Book, click on ‘Add’ to create a new promotion. You must specify a date range for which the promotion will be valid. Additionally, there are several text fields such as Display Name, Description, Text, and Cart Text that can be utilized to display relevant messaging on your website based on the type of promotion you are creating.

Configure Promotion

Once a promotion is created, you need to set up the necessary qualifications and benefits that are to be provided.

Qualifications are essentially a set of rules that must be met in order for the benefit to be triggered. Multiple qualifications can be be applied to a promotion.

There are many types of qualifications out of the box, e.g. based on date/time, whether the customer is registered, how many items the customer has in the cart etc. This allows you to build a complex set of criteria to target your segment accurately.

Benefits are the resulting set of advantages awarded to the customer who meets the qualification criteria.

You can provide benefits at the cart level or cart line item (product/variant) level. E.g. 10% off cart subtotal (percentage), $10 off cart subtotal (absolute) , 10% off specific item. You can also provide other benefits such as free shipping. Multiple benefits can also be provided such as discounts plus free shipping.

Coupons

Promotions can also be qualified using coupons. Coupons can either be public or private. You can create multi-use (public) or single use (private) coupons. Multi use coupons must be individually created and named, and single use coupons can be generated in bulk.

There you have it- you’re all equipped to start setting up your campaigns!

Stay tuned and hit the follow button- in a future post I will show you how to render product and cart level promotions to your cart details page.