Discounts

Article
11/12/2009

Discounts are a critical part of the Commerce Server merchandising system. The Commerce Server discounts feature provides you with the ability to create and publish promotional prices on products or product groups to users that meet certain specified conditions. You can apply discounts to any item in your catalog. You can apply a discount against an entire order (an order-level discount), or you can apply it against specific items in the order (an item-level discount).

Commerce Server 2002 provides you with the ability to apply multiple discounts to an item or an order, and control over the sequence in which the discounts are applied. Commerce Server 2002 also allows you to mix both item-level and order-level discounts in a single order. For information about the order in which multiple discount types appear, see Discount Sort Order. For information about multiple discounts, see Multiple Discounts.

Item-level discounts apply to specific products in the basket. You can apply multiple discounts to a single line item or to a single order.
Order-level discounts apply to all products in a shopping basket. For example, free shipping is a type of order-level discount—you can give users free shipping for all products in their basket. Order-level discounts delivered with Commerce Server are free shipping, and a percentage or dollar amount off the total price. You cannot apply multiple discounts to an order-level discount. Order-level discounts have an implicit limit of 1.

You can use Commerce Server to create and apply the following discount types:

Click-required discounts are only applied if the user clicks the discount URL, which may be an image of the product that says, for example, "10 percent off." Site developers can extend this type of discount for other uses, such as offering coupons, which the user must have in order to enjoy the discount.
Leverage discounts are based on the purchase of other products. For example, when users add a telephone to their basket, you can offer them a hands-free headset at checkout that they can then accept by adding it to their basket. Or, you can offer users another accessory at a discounted price.
Percentage-off discounts reduce the price of products by a percentage, rather than by a monetary amount. For example, you can discount products by 10 percent, and then change the price of the products as needed. When you change the price of the products, the discount amount is updated automatically.
Dollar-off discounts reduce the price of products by a fixed amount. For example, you can offer a $5.00 discount on certain products. Even though you may change the price of the products, the discount amount ($5.00) always stays the same.
"Happy Hour" discounts reduce the price of products during certain dates or times. To schedule discounts to apply during certain hours, you can build expressions that evaluate the Current Time property. For example, an expression you could use might be if Current Time > 5:00 pm and Current Time < 9:00 pm, discount the product by 10 percent.

You can apply these discounts to individual products, all the products in a category, or you can create an expression to discount products that meet specific criteria, for example, to offer a 10 percent discount on all items from a certain manufacturer.

For example, you can create discounts to apply in the following situations:

Price of product is greater than $20.00. This is a discount condition expression. Discount condition expressions are based on a product property.
User buys two of the same product. This is part of a required discount condition criteria.
User clicks a discount ad on the Sports page. This is the click-required part of a discount.
User is registered. This is a discount eligibility expression. Discount eligibility expressions are based on user profiles and context profiles.

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For examples of how to set up discounts for your various business tasks, see Discount Examples.

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Discounts

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