You can set up promotions in the Pricing > Promotions area of the ATG Control Center. Promotions specify options that define the circumstances under which site visitors will be offered promotions. For example, you can specify the type of discount calculation to use for each promotion (fixed amount off the regular price or a percentage off the regular price) and the period of time for which it applies. You can also specify other options such as the number of times a visitor can use the same discount.
After setting up a promotion, you must set up a scenario that determines the visitors who qualify for the promotion. (For more information, see the Creating Scenarios chapter in the ATG Personalization Guide for Business Users.) The scenario tells the system how to determine the people that qualify, and then it marks their visitor profiles accordingly by adding the promotion to their activePromotions profile attribute. You can also set up promotions that you are provided to all customers automatically– for these, you do not need to set up a scenario.
When a customer visits a page that contains a product and its associated price, or performs some other action that involves requesting a price from the system, ATG Commerce checks his or her visitor profile and looks at the activePromotions attribute to see whether the customer currently qualifies to receive any of the promotions you have set up. It also checks to see whether you have set up any automatic promotions. ATG Commerce then uses those discounts to calculate the price of the product for the customer, and it adjusts the price accordingly.
You can inform site visitors about promotions in several ways. For example, you could set up a discount for a product without advertising it in any special way; the visitor simply sees the adjusted price when he or she displays the checkout page. Alternatively, you could include some text that describes the offer on, for example, the “Welcome!” page and make that text a link to the regular catalog page for the product. Or you could send an e-mail that describes the promotion, perhaps including a discount coupon code in the message.
If you have installed the Pioneer Cycling Store demo site that comes with ATG Consumer Commerce, you can use it to see some examples of promotions. For more information about the demo, see the ATG Consumer Commerce Reference Application Guide.
