Promotions and gift cards

Promotions

Promotions allow merchants to offer special discounts to customers. Commerce Layer currently supports some standard promotions types that can help to cover the most common use cases (more to come):

• Percentage Discount — adds a specific percentage discount to the subtotal amount of the orders (if associated with an SKU list, the discount is calculated on the SKUs belonging to that list only).
• Free Shipping — sets to zero the shipping amount of the orders.
• Fixed Amount — adds a fixed amount discount to the orders.
• Free Gift — sets to zero the price of the SKUs belonging to a specific list.
• Fixed Price — imposes a fixed price for the SKUs belonging to a specific list.
• Buy X Pay Y – offers the customers a discount corresponding to X-Y units of a product for free for any X units of the same products added to the order (it's associated with an SKU list and can be used also in the cheapest free mode).

Promotions can be defined by currency or restricted to a market (in the latter case the currency is inherited by the market's price list). Users can create different promotions from the available promotion types. Commerce Layer also lets you integrate any promotional engine that is not supported by default as an external promotion. Every promotion will be configured with rules that must be satisfied to activate the promotion. The activation rules can include the market, the time range of validity, order amount, coupon code(s), etc. — custom rules based on filters are also available to enable almost any promotion logic.

Some promotions can be reserved for only specific customers. Either via a VIP/private sales business model between a business and a private customer group. Only customers who belong to the VIP customer group will have access to all promotions in the related market. Customers will get the price list and promotions associated with the customer group they belong to. Alternatively, you can associate customers with specific tags and trigger different promotions based on different tags.

In case different promotions are active at the same time on the same orders they are applied according to a default sequence based on the promotion type. That order of application can be changed by specifying a custom priority for the promotion involved. Promotions can be also marked as exclusive so that, if they are triggered, no other concurrent promotion is applied.

Activation rules

Promotions are enabled by default and can be disabled (and eventually re-enabled) at any time.

Activation rules are the rules that must be satisfied before an enabled promotion is triggered. If no activation rule is associated with an active promotion, the related discount will be applied to all the orders in scope. These rules include:

• Time range of validity — the activation and expiration time of the promotion.
• Currency / Market — the currency of the promotion (inherited by the price list of the market to which the promotion belongs, if defined).
• Total usage limit — the total number of times this promotion can be applied.
• Order amount — the amount an order's total must be for the promotion to be activated.
• SKU list — the SKUs an order must contain for the promotion to be activated.
• Coupon — the coupon codes must be applied for the promotion to be activated.
• Custom filters – based on specific conditions that the order or the associated resources must meet.

Users can update the rules for any promotion at any time. Promotions set with the SKU list rule have two options: they can be activated if the order contains any SKUs within the selected list or if the order contains all of the SKUs within the selected list. In order for an SKU list rule to apply to bundles the two resources must share the same SKU list (in this case there is no SKUs partial matching).

The number of promotions based on coupons is unlimited. The number of other promotion types that can be activated for a single organization is subject to limitations: only a maximum of 10 active promotions per organization is allowed (limit may vary depending on your plan). If more than 10 promotions are active at the same time, only the 10 that have higher priority will be applied.

Gift cards

Gift cards are a unique type of payment method. Customers can purchase gift cards and use them to pay for an order. All gift cards must be activated before being used. There are two types of gift cards:

• Rechargeable gift cards — card balance can be used and reloaded at any time.
• Single-use gift cards — card balance can only be used once.

The availability or usage of gift cards can be restricted by associating the gift card with one or more market(s). The market's currency must match the card's currency.

Gift card recipients

Gift card recipients allow users to associate a recipient with a purchased gift card. When a customer purchases a gift card, they might want to send it to a recipient. Users will integrate an email or transaction service to send an email to the recipient or physically print the gift card and ship it to the recipient.

When a gift card is redeemed, the gift card recipient is associated with the customer that placed the order.