Web Discounts

These could be thought of as offers or promotions. They are created and applied to a website and will apply on top of either the base price or any applied website or customer pricing schemes.

When creating discounts, you must then web-enable them and apply them to the one or more websites where you wish for them to apply.

Remember, web discounts will also apply to any manually created orders that are ‘linked’ to a source website by the administrator entering the order (choose the relevant website under source website).

Name and Description

Be sure to give your discounts attractive names and useful descriptions, as customers will see these in the website next to products that are included in the discount.

Products

You can specify a list of products which can act as either whitelist or blacklist in terms of which items the discount applies to. For example, if you list 5 products and don't check "Items is Blacklist" then the discount will apply only to those 5 items. If you did check "Items is Blacklist" then the discount would apply to all products expect those 5.

If you select the option to "require all products" then all of the specified products will be required to activate the discount.

Important! If you want to include all products in the discount, remember to leave the 'products' list empty and mark it as a blacklist (i.e. so you are excluding nothing)

Categories

You can also specify a list of categories, again as a blacklist or whitelist. Whitelisting a category will allow products in that category to apply to the discount, whereas blacklisting a category will mean that any products in that category will not be available for the discount.

Note that the 'category' restriction (whitelist or blacklist) works in conjunction with the 'product' setting described above, so products need to pass both the 'product' and 'category' filter to apply. If you only want to use the Category filter, then simply leave the 'product' list blank and set 'products is blacklist' (therefore including all products in the discount) - you'll then be able to use the category setting to control which categories are included or excluded from the offer.

Important! If you want to include all categories in the discount, remember to leave the 'categories' list empty and mark it as a blacklist (i.e. so you are excluding nothing)

Promo Codes

You can also choose to “hide” discounts under a promotion code. This means that the discount will not be announced on the website and shoppers will need to manually entere a promotion code in order to trigger the discount. If you want to do this, just enter a promotion code in the promo code field - otherwise the system will consider it an ‘open’ discount.

Single Use Per Customer

You can configure discounts so that customers can only use them once. You can see a list of discounts customers have previously used on their customer record.

Single Use Codes

Activation of the discount can be tied to "single use codes". You can give these codes to customers who enter them in the "Promo Code" field on the website in order to activate the discount. The catch is that once the code is used once it is "spent" and cannot be used again - either by that customer, or any other. You can combine these single-use codes with the above "single user per customer" option to make sure that customers can claim a particular discount only once, even if they have multiple codes (that's optional of course).

In order to use 'single-use codes you must check the option "Is Single Use" and then create individual codes in the "Single Use Codes" list. You can either create them manually - which is great if you want to create a code like "THANKS-FOR-YOUR-REVIEW" or "AN-OFFER-FOR-JON", or you can hit the "Generate Code" button as many times as you like to create random codes like 3jU8Rz or 5uT900. You can add as many codes as you like to the list, both manual and random, and they will disappear as customers use them up. You can always manually remove codes from the list too, if for some reason you need to remove access to a discount through a code you previously gave out. Be careful with that though - if you remove a code, no customer will be able to use it ever again (although you could easily manually add it back in).

Discount Accumulation

You can choose to make discounts non accumulable which will stop shoppers stacking multiple discounts on top of each other. The system defaults to a generosity heuristic when deciding whether to apply a non-accumulable discount or a series of accumulable discounts - basically meaning that it will apply the discount that is most beneficial to the shopper. This is designed to avoid situations where a customer would end up worse off when applying a discount.

Percentage Discounts

These adjust prices by a percentage, rather than a fixed amount - for example, a 20% discount.

Fixed Discounts

These adjust prices by a fixed amount, for example 10 EURO. With fixed discounts, tax calculation is somewhat complicated. You need to decide whether the fixed amount discount you are offering is the discount amount after the application of tax (a net discount, more useful in retail scenarios) or before the application of tax (more useful in a trade scenario). The system defaults to after tax, so if you enter a discount of 10 EURO then retail customers will get exactly that discount, irrespective of the tax rate. This is most often the desired effect.

Note that the fixed discount amount you enter is a unit rate - so it’s 10 EURO per unit. Again, this is most often what you will mean when you specify a fixed discount.

Fixed Single Discounts

In this case, the fixed discount amount you specify will apply only once, not per unit*. Use this calculation type to achieve discounts like "Spend over £100 and get £10 Off". Note that all other conditions attached to the way the discount works are the same (e.g. items/categories involved in the discount, accumulability, minimum spend).

X for Y Discounts

'X for Y' type discounts mean the customer gets X products/units for the price of Y products/units. For example, a common offer seen in supermarkets is '3 for 2', which means you get 3 units for the price of 2 (or stated another way, 'Buy 2, get 1 free'). Pakk allows you to create any variation of such an offer, for example '5 for 3', '5 for 4', '2 for 1' etc. Just set the 'X' value to the first number (i.e. the '3' in '3 for 2') and 'Y' to the second number.

Here are some of the finer points to take into consideration:

• If you only add a single product into the discount, then the customer will need to purchase multiple units of that product.

• If you add multiple products (or entire categories), then customers will be able to mix and match any of those products (including multiples of any of them) to get the discount. For example, if you make a '3 for 2' including Product A and Product B, the customer could get the discount by purchasing: 3 of A, 2 of A + 1 of B, 1 of A + 2 of B, 3 of B.

• The discount uses the common 'lowest price item free' heuristic when applying the discount to groups of products with different prices.

• It's probably best NOT to have a certain product appear in different 'X for Y' discounts at the same time, as the results would be unpredictable. If you choose to do this, make the offers 'non accumulable' so they don't step on each others' toes.

• 'X for Y' discounts can get pretty thorny to calculate/understand when the customer is claiming the discount multiple times on an order where lots of the included products are purchased in multiple combinations and quantities. The algorithm is programmed to be 'generous': it makes sure that the customer could not have done better by splitting their purchase into multiple carts in order to get a bigger discount (in order to avoid a customer complaining that 'if only I had bought the products 3 at a time, I would have got a bigger discount).

Restrictions on Discounts

Order-Level Restrictions

Minimum Order Value

This is the minimum subtotal value on the whole order that is necessary to activate this discount. Use this control to create discounts of the type "Get £10 off when you spend £100 or more". By default this minumum refers to the order 'inc VAT' subtotal, but for trade/wholesale sites you might choose to use the 'ex VAT' total by selecting Minimum Orer Value is Ex Tax.

Discount-Level Restrictions

These restrictions all refer to subtotals of the lines included in the discount, rather than the whole order.

Minimum Units

For items included in this discount only, this is the minimum total number of units that need to be purchased in order to fire the discount. Use this to create discounts of the type "25% Off when you buy 3 or more Christmas products".

Minimum Items

Similar to the above, but instead of units, it counts "items". You could use this to create a 10% discount, for example, when customers try at least 3 different items from a new range.

Minimum Weight

Similar again, but this time the sum of the weight of the discounted products is the restriction. If you bulk sell a number of products and would like to offer a discount if a customer buys, for example, more than 10Kg, this is the way to do it.

Minimum Value

This is somewhat similar to the 'Minimum Order Value' restrictions, but only counts the value of the actual items in the discount, not the whole order. So for example, you could create offers like "Get 20% Off when you Spend £100 or more on Beauty Products".