Promotions specify options that define the conditions under which site visitors will qualify for the promotion. Once the customer has met the qualifying criteria, they will be offered the promotion.

When defining a promotion, you provide the qualifying conditions for the promotion. For example, you might create a condition to recognize when a customer’s order reaches a certain amount. Or you can create a condition that offers a promotion whenever a person purchases a specific product. Not all promotions require a condition. For example, group discounts, when available, are applied to all of the items within the shopper’s cart, and therefore do not require a qualifying condition.

After you have defined the conditions that qualify the customer for the promotion, you define the offer. When you create an offer, you are creating discount rules that indicate which items will be discounted, and what type of discount the customer will receive. For example, you might create an offer that applies to all of the items within a customer’s cart, discounting the entire order by ten percent. Or you might create an offer that discounts a specific product by a fixed price of ten dollars.

Oracle ATG Web Commerce Merchandising provides several templates that you can use to create conditions and offers. These templates have been designed to select the type of offer or condition that is associated with a type of promotion. For example, you can create a By One Get One (BOGO) promotion using the BOGO template. This template provides default conditions and offers that are applied in a BOGO promotion.

However, not all promotions are captured within templates. You can create customized promotions using Advanced Condition and Offer statements. These statements allow you to create sophisticated and complex promotions.

For detailed information on all of the condition and offer templates available in Merchandising, as well as creating advanced condition and offer statements, refer to the Merchandising Guide for Business Users.

Once you have set up a promotion, you must decide who qualifies for the promotion. The easiest approach is to set up promotions that are provided to all customers automatically. If you want to be more selective, you can set up parameters that determine which visitors qualify for the promotion.

When a customer logs in, Oracle ATG Web Commerce checks his or her visitor profile and looks at the activePromotions attribute to see whether the customer qualifies for any of the promotions you have set up. Those discounts are used to calculate the price of items when they are added to the shopping cart.

You do not have to inform customers about promotions; you could set up the promotion so that the customer sees the adjusted price during checkout. If you want to inform your customers about promotions, you have several options, including the following:

You create promotions using the Merchandising section of the Business Control Center. For detailed information on working with Merchandising components, refer to the Merchandising Guide for Business Users.