Advanced conditions and offers can be used as part of an item, order, or shipping promotion. Rather than providing a template of preselected properties, an advanced condition and offer statement allows you to build any combination of condition and offer criteria necessary for your promotion.
You can start a promotion using a template and convert it to an advanced condition and offer. The converted promotion keeps any criteria you have already set, and allows you to add whatever is not included in the template.
To create an advanced promotion:
Create a new item, order, or shipping promotion as usual.
Click in the Condition and Offer section to activate it.
Click Add.
Click Create Advanced Condition & Offer.
Create the condition for your promotion.
Specify whether items that qualify a customer for a promotion can also be considered targets for the promotion.
Note: In addition, if the qualifier and target items for a promotion overlap, and if you have selected No discounts on qualifier items, you may see unexpected behavior in your promotions. For example, you may create a promotion “Buy 1 hat, get a gift from the accessories category.” The customer adds a hat to the cart. Because hats belong to the accessories category, it is eliminated from consideration as a qualifying item, and the gift is not added to the cart. If the customer goes on to add a pair of gloves, those are treated as the target, and the hat is a qualifier; the gloves are repriced as free.
Click the dropdown arrow to display a list with the options Always, When, and For.
Selecting When or For displays a series of conditions that appear as a sentence. The items you see in the rule are the first item in a dropdown menu from which you can select a different item. Sometimes an item will be an empty space that you fill in by selecting a repository item or entering text.
Note that if you start the condition phrase with “When,” the items specified can also be used to qualify for other promotions. If you start the phrase with “For,” the items cannot be used to qualify for any other promotions.
Also note that if your condition phrase is based on “order contains only,” it is possible for an empty cart to qualify for a promotion if qualifier items have been filtered out previously. Qualifier items could be filtered out by previously-applied promotions or due to the “No discounts on qualifier items” constraint.
Warning: If you are creating a Gift with Purchase promotion, be aware that target gift items can qualify for their own promotions unless you specifically exclude them. The provided Gift with Purchase templates prevent this, but if you are creating an Advanced condition, be aware that this case is possible; always use For conditions for Gift with Purchase.
Note that discount rules can incorporate complex and/or statements that designate an order of operations using parentheses. The rule wizard will sometimes include parentheses automatically to organize items into phrases.
At the end of most rules, you’ll see a parenthesis. If you want to add a new phrase to a rule, click the last element and select either and or or.
Check the No discounts on qualifier items box if you do not want items that can be used to qualify for the promotion to also be eligible for discounts.
Create the offer for your promotion. The offer options depend on the type of promotion. Set some or all of the following:
The following table describes the offer properties:
Property | Description |
|---|---|
Offer Type | Select Standard, Tiered, or Gift with Purchase. |
Items to discount | Creates a rule similar to the condition statement, which identifies items eligible for the discount. |
Apply Discount To | Select whether the discount should be applied to the lowest or the highest priced items in the order first. |
Discount Type | Select amount off, percentage off, fixed item price, or free. |
Discount | Enter the amount of the discount or, if the Discount Type is Fixed Item Price, enter the price of the item. |
Gift with Purchase | If you are creating a Gift with Purchase promotion, specify the gift item or items. If you provide a single gift item, it is automatically added to the customer’s cart once the cart qualifies for the promotion. If you specify more than one possible gift, the shopper receives all gifts. |
Auto Remove from Cart? | If you are creating a Gift with Purchase promotion, specify whether gift items that were automatically added to the cart should be automatically removed if the cart no longer qualifies. |
Note: If you have created your own templates or manually editing the PMDL, it is possible for you to create a condition and offer that do not conform to the PMDL syntax. If you attempt to view a promotion that has invalid PMDL, Merchandising displays the raw PMDL that includes the error.
Rules with errors cannot be displayed in editable form; however, by viewing the PMDL you may be able to locate the problem. If an error occurs, your administrators can extract the PMDL from the repository and correct the error manually.
