Promotions are divided into three general types:
Item Discount Promotions—The customer receives a discount on an item or items.
Order Discount Promotions—The customer receives a discount to an entire order.
Shipping Discount Promotions—The customer receives discounted shipping.
After setting up a promotion in Merchandising, you have several options on how to deliver the promotion to users.
Create a coupon or batch of coupons that grants the promotion to a user profile. A standard coupon has a single associated code that can be used to claim that coupon, which is often widely distributed to customers (a common example is a coupon that grants free shipping to users during the holidays). For situations in which you want to restrict the use of coupons, use a coupon batch; the coupon batch generates a random authentication code for each individual coupon, to ensure that the coupon cannot be passed on to other customers. (For more information, see Using Coupons with Promotions in this guide.)
Create a scenario that determines the visitors who qualify for the promotion. 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
activePromotionsprofile attribute. (For more information, see the Creating Scenarios chapter in the ATG Personalization Guide for Business Users.)
You can also set up promotions that are provided to all customers automatically– for these, you do not need to set up a scenario or a coupon.
When a customer adds an item to their cart or performs any other action that involves requesting a price from the system, ATG Commerce checks their visitor profile to see whether they currently qualify to receive any of the promotions you have set up. If a customer qualifies, ATG Commerce uses the promotion 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. 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. You could use the GetApplicablePromotions droplet to identify promotions that apply to particular items, and display this information on the product page. Or you could send an e-mail that describes the promotion, perhaps including a discount coupon code in the message.
