1 Promotions Overview

Promotional price changes are temporary reductions in price for one or more items at one or more stores for a defined amount of time. Promotions are made up of a collection of offers, which define the reward and the conditions to receive the reward. Offers can be applied to regular priced items, clearance items, or both.

Pricing supports two levels of offers, item and transaction. Each offer level has templates associated with it which define how the offer is set up. For example, some offer templates will require only reward related information to be defined, such as the item level offer Get Y for Discount. This type of offer requires only the list of items that can be discounted if purchased and the discount amount or percent. Whereas other offer types, such as the transaction level Spend X, Get Discount offer, require a conditional spend amount, as well as a list of items that must be purchased to reach that spend amount, along with reward details such as the discount amount/percent and, optionally, a list of items excluded from the transaction level discount.

Note:

There are certain fields within the templates whose behavior will vary based on system option settings. In some cases the setting of a system option will even hide a field.

Table 1-1 Offer Types

Offer Type	Template	Examples
Item Level Offers
Simple Discount	Get Y for Discount	25% off all women's shoes
Buy/Get	Buy X, Get Discount	Buy any 3 board games, get $10 off
Buy/Get	Spend X, Get Discount	Spend $25 in Toys, get $5 off
Buy/Get	Buy X, Get Y for Discount	Buy 2 pairs of shoes; get a pair of socks for 50% off
Buy/Get	Spend X, Get Y for Discount	Spend $15 on breakfast cereal, get 25% off any 2 cartons of milk
Buy/Get	Buy X of Single Item for Discount	Buy 2 watermelons for $6
Buy/Get	Buy X and Y, Get Discount	Buy a sandwich, chips, and drink for $5.00
Buy/Get	Buy X and Y, Get Z for Discount	Buy a scarf and hat, get 50% off gloves
Gift with Purchase	Buy X, Get Gift with Purchase	Buy any 2 BBQ items, get a free beach towel
Gift with Purchase	Spend X, Get Gift with Purchase	Spend $200 in racquets, get a free can of tennis balls
Transaction Level Offers
Simple Discount	Get Discount	10% off your purchase today only
Buy/Get	Buy X, Get Discount	Buy 3 reams of paper, get $5 your purchase
Buy/Get	Spend X, Get Discount	Spend $100 in cleaning supplies, get 5% off your purchase

If supplier-controlled pricing is enabled for Consignment and Concession ownership models through system option configuration in Merchandising, the primary supplier and purchase type can be added to item simple discounts so that when the offer is applied to item/locations these additional attributes can be considered. When offers are created via online screens in Pricing, a Generated By field is systematically set as Retailer. This field indicates what type of user has created a given promotion, a retailer user or supplier user.

When applying the simple promotion offer, downstream systems such as third-party POS need to compare item/location's primary supplier, purchase type and pricing control against offer’s primary supplier, purchase type and generated by values. The pricing control value is defined at primary supplier/location level for consignment/concession items in Merchandising and specifies whether the simple promotion offer can be created and managed by the retailer or the supplier.

Emergency Offers

There is a system option called Price Event Processing Days that is set to designate the number of days required between the current date and the effective date of a price event. This rule ensures that promotions are created and approved with enough advance timing that stores and other impacted areas can react accordingly.

However, for situations where promotional offers were missed for one or more items or locations, emergency price events can be created. A separate security privilege provides the ability to limit the users that can create these emergency events.

When an emergency offer is created and approved the information is passed to downstream systems the next time the extracts are run.