Operate > IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce > Marketing tool > Work with Web and Dialog activities > Activity building blocks: triggers, targets, and actions > Actions in marketing activities
Action: Display Promotional Price
Use this action in a Web activity to display the discounted price of the catalog entry that the customer is currently viewing. You specify one or more promotions to use to calculate the discount. On the storefront, WebSphere Commerce displays the discounted price in an e-Marketing Spot associated with the catalog entry. In this way, you can draw attention to a promotion that customers might otherwise overlook.
Example
Here is one example of how you can use the Display Promotional Price action to calculate potential savings for catalog entries. In this example, the store offers this promotion: Save 5% when you pay with MasterCard. The store home page displays featured catalog entries.
To encourage customers to pay with MasterCard, to display the reduced price resulting from this promotion in a special e-Marketing Spot beneath each catalog entry.
You build the following Web activity for the store home page:
When a customer views the home page, calculate how much each catalog entry displayed on the page would cost after applying the MasterCard payment promotion. Then display the new price and the promotion description in the FeaturedPaymentPromotion e-Marketing Spot beneath the catalog entry.
When this Web activity is activated, the result on the store home page looks like this example:
This box illustrates the locations of the FeaturedPaymentPromotion e-Marketing Spot on the page (the box does not display on the storefront). In this example, notice that the FeaturedPaymentPromotion e-Marketing Spot is included multiple times on the store page.
The JSP file for the e-Marketing Spot defines which pieces of information about the promotional price to display, that is:
- The new price after the promotion is applied to the catalog entry
- The Customer viewable short description text that is defined for the promotion in its properties view
If the catalog entry is a product with several SKUs, or a bundle, or if the catalog entry is not an orderable item, the Web activity will not display the promotional price.
Requirements for e-Marketing Spots used in Web activities with this action
For the Display Promotional Price action to be effective, use it in a Web activity for an e-Marketing Spot that is either:
- Associated with a catalog entry, based on how a store developer created the store JSP page.
An example is the e-Marketing Spot beneath each catalog entry in the previous example. In this case, the store developer must program the store JSP page to pass the productId to the e-Marketing Spot JSP snippet. Then the Display Promotional Price action can calculate the new price for the specific catalog entry.
- On a product display page.
To determine which catalog entry the customer is currently viewing, the server uses the productId value on the ProductDisplay URL.
Note that if the store uses page view names or URL parameter names that are different from the default, then the Display Promotional Price action will not work unless a store developer performs some customization steps. See Changing the name of commands used in behavior rule matching.
Prerequisites for using this action
Before adding the Display Promotional Price action to a Web activity:
- Make sure a site administrator has the site configured to support Management Center marketing features. See Configure marketing for Management Center.
- The promotion must exist in the Management Center so that you can specify it in the Web activity. See Create promotions.
- On the store page containing the e-Marketing Spot, a store developer must use an e-Marketing Spot snippet that supports the display of promotional price information. A sample snippet, ESpotNavDisplayBrazilExt.jspf, is provided with the Brazil starter store.
To learn more about this snippet and how to access it, see Sample e-Marketing Spot JSP snippets and the Web activities they support.
- If you plan to use an e-Marketing Spot that is not on a product display page, talk to a store developer to ensure that the store page JSP files and e-Marketing Spots are set up to support the Display Promotional Price action. A typical example is a single page that displays multiple catalog entries in a grid. See the Brazil starter store home page for an example of how this support is implemented for a store page.
Guidelines for using this action
- Promotions that might be good candidates are those that apply to an order or a top-level category, rather than to a specific catalog entry. These types of promotions typically affect the price of many catalog entries and therefore make good use of the e-Marketing Spot. Here are some examples:
- Order-level promotions, such as 10% Off Your Order
- Payment type promotions that require the customer to pay using a certain method, as in the previous example
- Top-level category promotions, such as 20% Off Furniture
- Do not use the following promotions with the Display Promotion Price action because they do not affect the price of a catalog entry:
- Ship promotions
- Free gift promotions
If you use a promotion that requires a specific payment method or applies only to a specific shipping method, these conditions are ignored when displaying the promotional price.
- You can specify more than one promotion. For each catalog entry, the Display Promotional Price action can calculate the discounted price for multiple promotions and then display the final price.
Related concepts
Activity building blocks: triggers, targets, and actions
Actions in marketing activities