Peak times of demand such as Christmas and Easter can put strain on an E-commerce site's physical resources. Encouraging customers to buy ahead of time might help to ease this - and e-commerce discounts can be a good way to do this. Here is a quick round up of the discount and coupon offers available through our Drupal Commercebased systems:
Types of offer
- £ off - fixed amount off total order
- % off - fixed percentage off total order
- free shipping
- % off shipping - applied to each shipping method individually - i.e. 10% off standard UK delivery
- shipping service upgrade - upgrade to next day delivery
- add free bonus products - free box of chocolates with every order
Conditions
Also, these can be applied only with certain conditions being met:
- total amount - over £x get a free x
- user - only give offer to particular specific users
- products - only add the discount when certain products are purchased
- address - limit by postcode or other address factor
- total order weight - limit to only orders over a certain weight
Limits
Offers can apply to the entire order - or be limited to certain products. When limiting offers to individual products there are the following options
- individual specific products
- product category - i.e. T-shirts
- discounts can be limited by time e.g. - Nov 1st to Nov 30th, limited to a number of uses per user - i.e. one use per user - and also limited to a maximum overall usage - i.e. First 50 people get 10% off shipping.
Product or Order Discounts
Discounts can be applied to the entire order at the checkout - or we can add discounts to products as they appear on the site, as in this example
So, as you can see, there are a wide range of options on offer. Picking the right options is a question of assessing your target audience, looking at what will work best for your product range and testing. It's also best to have these systems tried and tested ahead of the busy periods so that when your systems are busier than usual you are not figuring out how the discounts work and troubleshooting.