Expanding possibilities with our new promotion endpoints and improvements.
A big upgrade to our promotions engine
It goes without saying that promotions and discounts are an indispensable part of any business. These days, it’s not enough to run promotions for holidays or overstocks. Customers are bombarded with offers from every vendor they’ve ever interacted with, to the point where only 12.3% of non-automated emails from retailers are opened. Just look at your inbox right now, how many amazing deals are sitting there unopened?
We understand that it isn’t just about the promotion itself, it’s about making it stand out. This is why we’re happy to announce the first wave of improvements to our promotions engine, all of which are now available on our Core API. These improvements include new promotion types, readjusted limits around our promotions, and sophisticated rule-based triggers that provide greater flexibility in building promotions.
Buy X, pay Y
We’ve added the buy X, pay Y type of promotion into our Core API. This popular promotion is a great way to increase average order value, clear out excessive stock, or even simply to drive up sales.
The way it works is pretty simple. The merchant determines the amount of SKUs that are part of the promotion (buy X amount of SKUs) for the price of the amount of SKUs the customer actually pays for (for the price of Y amount of SKUs).
For example, a sock company sees that most of their customers order two pairs of $10 socks. Previous fixed price promotions have seen higher sales, but with the same average order values. With the new buy X, pay Y promotion type, the merchant can build a promotion to sell 4 pairs for $30, which incentivizes customers to buy two more socks with an effective discount of $10. It’s a great way to repackage discounts, which can in turn incentivize more sales.
You can also create new buy X, pay Y promotions through our admin panel, as shown here below.
Promotion priority and exclusivity
When you have multiple promotions running at once, it’s important to set guardrails that prevent promotions from stacking unintentionally. That’s why we’ve also introduced promotion priority, which defines the order of application for all running promotions. Priority works by setting a score to a promotion — the lower the score, the higher the priority. Think of it as ranking promotions in the order you want them applied. With priority, brands can now juggle multiple concurrent promotions at once, while controlling which promotions are applied when certain criteria is met.
We’ve also included a way for clients to mark promotions as exclusive. When an exclusive promotion is triggered, all concurrent promotions can no longer apply. This acts as insurance when multiple promotions are running at once, especially if the “exclusive” promotion has a pretty hefty discount attached to it.
All of our promotions in our admin panel now have priority and exclusivity as options, as seen here when you create a new buy X, pay Y promotion.
New promotion limits, including unlimited coupon promotions
As brands scale, their promotion requirements scale with them. We’ve readjusted our promotion limits to better accommodate our clients, including unlimited coupon-based promotions. Now, our clients can run as many coupon-based promotions as they want at any given time. No hidden costs, no catches, no limits.
We’ve also readjusted our automatic promotion limits to 10 per organization. This doesn’t mean that each organization can only have 10 automatic promotion objects, it simply means that 10 automatic promotions can run concurrently at any given time. This is especially useful for international brands. On global holidays such as Christmas or Easter, you can set suitable promotion types and amounts for each market, instead of having a storewide promotion that can affect margins in developing markets.
Custom promotion rules
We’ve also introduced new custom promotion rules, which greatly expands how promotions can be triggered. They allow you to build logic to trigger promotions based on specific conditions of the order or other associated resources. In the hands of innovative brands, these custom promotion rules open up all kinds of possibilities. You can even gamify your promotions by adding sophisticated triggers that revolve around orders, SKU lists, time of day, and much more!
More to come!
This is just the first release in our initiative to update our promotions engine. We’re also developing a user-facing application that will harness all of the improvements we’ve just released. If you have any feedback for our releases, or you want to get updates on our new Promotions application, join us on our Slack channel!
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