Promotions
Promotions allow you to offer customers incentives to purchase. WebSphere Commerce supports numerous types of promotions such as price promotions, including simple discounts, and merchandise specials such as gifts with purchase, and buy one, get one; service promotions, which currently provide reduced shipping costs; and coupon promotions which mimic paper coupons you might find in your local newspaper. Promotions are created and managed using the Promotions tool in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. If your store has enabled workspaces, promotions may be managed using workspaces and inherit the benefits from that feature. Once created, the promotions must be deployed to the production server before they are available to customers.
Promotions can be associated with your marketing campaigns so that they are factored in to any statistics gathered for the campaign to which the promotion belongs. Additionally, you can assign a promotion code to your promotion.
Promotion Groups
Promotion groups, as the name implies, group promotions according to their type. These groups have no hierarchical structure, or priority. By default, each store has the following promotion groups:
- Product Level Promotions
- Order Level Promotions
- Shipping Promotions
Exclusivity
Each promotion has an exclusivity setting. This governs how the promotion should be evaluated with respect to other promotions. For instance, you can configure a promotion so that it is exclusive within its own promotion group, which means that if the promotion is applied, no other promotions from the same group can be applied. Alternatively, you can configure the promotion so that it is exclusive at a global level, so that if the promotion is applied, no other promotion can be applied to the order.
specifying an order level or shipping promotion as exclusive within the selected group effectively does nothing. By default, both of these promotion groups only allow a single promotion within the group to be applied to a single order. However, promotions in the order group are not exclusive of promotions in the shipping group, by default. The same is true for shipping promotions; they are not exclusive of promotions in the order group. This means that a customer can receive both an order level promotion, and a shipping promotion, if they qualify. This behavior is explained further in the next section on promotion policies.
Promotion Policies
Promotion policies determines whether a conflict situation would arise when a particular promotion is applied in addition to any previously applied promotions. If no conflict is detected, this promotion is added to the list of applicable promotions; otherwise it is eliminated and will not be applied to the order.
Policies are predefined and pre-configured store-level assets. Policies may be optionally associated with one or more promotion groups. If a policy is not associated with a promotion group, it is considered a global policy which applies to all promotions. If a policy is associated with a promotion group, it is considered a local policy, and applies only to those promotions in the group to which this policy is associated.
WebSphere Commerce includes the following policies:
- Enforces that each unit of each order item cannot be used more than once to qualified for a given promotion.
- Enforces the exclusiveness of promotions at a global level, so that they cannot be combined with any other promotions.
- Enforces the exclusiveness of promotions at a group level, so that they cannot be combined with any other promotions.
- Enforces that no promotion results in an order total being sold at a negative price.
- Enforces that only one order level promotion can be applied to a particular order. However, the same promotion could be applied to multiple orders.
- Enforces defined promotion application limits.
- Optional policy used to enforce backward compatibility, if required. This policy mimics the behavior as that demonstrate by order level promotion in V5.5, which specified that each order item cannot be used more than once to qualify for a given promotion. The difference between this and the first policy is illustrated by the following example: If a customer buys five pairs of pants, and you have a promotion which gives a free gift for every three pair purchased, the current version will still consider the remaining two pairs of pants for other promotions. The backward compatibility policy removes the remaining two pair from consideration for other promotions.
The default configuration associates the policies to the promotion groups as follows:
Global Policies: 2 and 7
Order Level Promotions: 5 and 6
Product Level Promotions: 1, 3, and 6
Shipping Promotions: 1, 3, and 6
Availability
To determine whether a promotion is available, the system checks its status. If the promotion is currently in the Active state, then the evaluation continues. If the promotion is Inactive, it is considered unavailable, and is not evaluated.
The next consideration is a promotion's schedule. When you create a promotion define availability dates, which act as boundaries. Furthermore, when you create a promotion, you might optionally specify that the promotion is only available on one or more specific days of the week. In the same manner, you have the ability to define a promotion such that it is only available within a certain time period, such as between noon and 5:00 PM. If the current timestamp (according to the WebSphere Commerce Server) falls between the two availability dates, and meets the other optional scheduling criteria, it is considered available. Otherwise, the promotion is considered unavailable, and the promotion is not evaluation further.
Applicability
Once a promotion is determined to be available, it is evaluated to determine whether it is applicable to the current shopping cart. You may target specific customers by selecting one or more customer segments to either target or exclude during promotion creation. If the current customer is not a member of the target segment, or is a member of an excluded customer segment, then the promotion is not applicable.
You must define purchase conditions during promotion creation. These conditions may be at either the product level, or the order level. For instance, if you want to offer a 10% price reduction on a product, the purchase condition would require that the customer's shopping cart contains the specific product. In the same manner, if you wanted to offer free shipping on orders totaling over $100, the purchase condition would require that the shopping cart total exceed $100.
Application limits
You can impose limits on your promotions' applicability in three different ways:
- Maximum number of times that the promotion can be applied. This limits the total number of times the promotion can be applied by all customers. For example, if you wanted to reduce inventory on some item, you might set this application limit to match the amount of the item that you have in inventory, to ensure that no one can use the promotion once the item has been cleared out.
- Maximum number of times that the promotion can be applied by a particular customer. If you define a value for this, it limits the total number of times that a customer can take advantage of a promotional offer.
- Maximum number of times that the promotion can be applied to a particular qualifying order. If you define a value for this, it limits the total number of times that a customer can take advantage of a promotional offer at one time. For example, if you had a gift with purchase promotion that offered a free tie when a customer buys two dress shirts, you might only want to allow a customer to apply this promotion once on any given order. Otherwise, a customer buying ten shirts might qualify for 5 ties. Note that by default, this application limit has no effect on order level and shipping promotions.
Applicability limits are often communicated to customers so that there are no surprises. For example, some promotions are communicated as being in effect, "while supplies last", while other limits are communicated directly, such as "Limit, two per customer". If you impose application limits on a promotion, consider including this information in any advertising messages to ensure accurate customer expectations.
Promotion status
Promotions that are current may be in one of two states; namely Active or Inactive. New promotions are inactive by default when created. Promotions can be activated, or deployed, at any time. Likewise, an active promotion may be withdrawn at any time. Reports on a promotion detail the information gathered during the current, or most recent active period. Whenever you activate an inactive promotion, all statistics for that promotion are reset to zero. If you withdraw a promotion, propagate the promotion to the production server for the change to take effect. Note that these statistics are used as counters for application limits, so reactivating a promotion resets any application numbers back to zero.
Advertising your promotions
You can advertise promotions using the marketing tools in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. To do so, create content which supports the promotion, and select the content when you are assigning the advertisement to a particular e-Marketing Spot. The content you create can range from simple flat text describing the promotion, to images with actions defined for how to respond when a customer clicks on them. You can also surface information about the promotions in your store pages. For example, you could surface the promotion name, or description if necessary, by including the
CalculationCodeListDatabean on your JSP, and then using the methods on that data bean to access the information directly.Related concepts
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