Promotions Overview

You can create a wide range of feature-rich promotions with SuitePromotions, the latest promotions offering from NetSuite.

SuitePromotions take advantage of all the most recent promotion enhancements, as well as user interface and performance improvements.

You can offer your customers:

Item promotions that give percentage or currency amount discounts on items.
Fixed price item promotions that give items for a fixed discounted price.
Order promotions that give percentage or currency discounts at the order level.
Shipping promotions that give your customers free shipping on specific shipping methods.
Free gift promotions that give your customers an item for free.

Important:

This help topic does not cover Standard promotions and promotions created using the Advanced Promotions SuiteApp. You are encouraged to replace such promotions with SuitePromotions. For more information, see Migrating to SuitePromotions.

For information regarding standard and Advanced promotions, see the Standard and Advanced Promotions guide.

Enhancements Introduced in SuitePromotions

With SuitePromotions, NetSuite has introduced several enhancements that enrich the way you offer promotions to your customers:

Stackable Promotions
Auto-Apply Promotions
Best Offer
Cached Saved Searches
Audit and Visibility
Automatically Add Free Gift to the Transaction
Customer Specific Promotions
Qualifying Item Quantity
Configure free shipping eligibility

Note:

Standard and Advanced promotions are not compatible with the new enhancements introduced in SuitePromotions.

Stackable Promotions

NetSuite lets you offer your customers better discounts by applying multiple promotions to one transaction. You can add any combination of item promotions, order promotions, and shipping promotions to an order.

You also have complete control over which promotions you want to be able to stack and which you would prefer to be exclusive and not combined with other promotions.

Stackable Promotions work with the Auto-Apply Promotions feature so that sales reps can have NetSuite automatically apply multiple promotions to an order. For information on automatically applying promotions to a transaction, see Automatically Applying Promotions.

Stackable Promotions require very little configuration. After you enable the SuitePromotions feature, you can apply more than one promotion to a transaction, see Configuring Promotions.

Auto-Apply Promotions

NetSuite lets you automatically apply multiple promotions to a transaction. This streamlines the work of your sales reps by automatically applying eligible promotions without the need to manually find out which promotions should be applied. The Auto-Apply Promotions feature ensures multiple promotions are quickly added to transactions at the point of sale.

Auto-apply runs in the background and when changes are made to a transaction it determines which promotions the transaction is eligible for.

Currently, you can automatically apply up to 30 active promotions to a transaction for a specific date range per location. You can however, add more promotions manually if the transaction is eligible. For more information, see Auto-Apply Promotions Limits.

Before promotions can be automatically applied to a transaction you must first enable the required features in NetSuite and create the promotion records, see Configuring Promotions.

The following diagram shows the steps needed to automatically apply promotions to a transaction.

Steps for applying promotions to a transaction.

For information on automatically applying promotions to a transaction, see Automatically Applying Promotions.

Best Offer

When several promotions are eligible on a transaction including exclusive promotions, NetSuite applies the promotion or promotions that ensure the customer gets the best offer (the largest discount on the transaction) available. If you have many promotions running at the same time, Best Offer in combination with the Auto-Apply Promotions feature saves you valuable time and keeps your customers happy. Best Offer also works equally well with manually applied promotions.

For more information, see How Best Offer is Applied.

Cached Saved Searches

The Cached Saved Search feature lets you configure the way that a promotion handles saved searches. You can choose to use cached saved searches which provide better performance by returning the results faster. You can also choose to check for the latest saved search results every time a promotion is applied to a transaction to get the most up to date results possible, but results are retrieved slower.

For more information, see Saved Search Performance.

Audit and Visibility

Audit and Visibility provides details of the promotions that are applied to transactions. This is important when multiple promotions can be automatically applied to a transaction, and the Best Offer logic is managing which combination of promotions are applied. With Audit and Visibility you can see which promotions have been applied to a transaction, which have not been applied, and the reasons why.

For more information see Viewing the Status of Applied Promotions.

Automatically Add Free Gift to the Transaction

With SuitePromotions, you can create a promotion that automatically adds a free gift to an eligible transaction. Currently, any inventory item can be offered as a free gift with the exception of parent-matrix items.

For more information see Creating Free Gift Promotions.

Customer Specific Promotions

Customer Specific Promotions lets you create promotions destined for one or more customer categories, one or more customers, or a customer group. Customer groups can be either static or dynamic. If you use a dynamic customer group, you can choose to use a cached version of the results, or you can run the customer group every time the promotion is applied.

For more information, see Setting Customer Eligibility on SuitePromotions.

Qualifying Item Quantity

This feature lets you specify how many items a shopper needs to buy in order to be eligible for the discount provided by a SuitePromotion. You can choose if the discount is repeated when multiple qualifying items are bought, or if it is applied to an order one time only, regardless of how many qualifying items are bought. Furthermore, with Item and Item Fixed Price SuitePromotions, you can now apply the discount to each eligible item in the order, rather than just the cheapest or most expensive. Qualifying Item Quantity is available for all types of SuitePromotion.

Note:

The following limitations exist on the usage of repeating the discount incrementally:

– You cannot repeat a discount incrementally and apply the discount to each item in the order on an Item type SuitePromotion

– You cannot repeat a discount incrementally and offer a percentage discount on an Order type SuitePromotion.

– You cannot repeat discounts incrementally on Shipping type SuitePromotions.

Qualifying Item Quantity is defined in the What the Customer Needs to Buy section of a SuitePromotion form.