Let’s say you are looking for an e-commerce platform. Also, let’s say that you want to incorporate discounts and promotions in your online strategy. This is important for your customers because who doesn’t love a good discount when shopping online? Also, when done correctly, discount pricing can help you gain and retain loyal customers. Additionally, discount strategies bring more advantages, such as increasing sales, getting rid of unsold inventory that takes space in your warehouse and promoting new products.
Currently, we at CustomSoft implement three e-commerce platforms: BigCommerce, Akinon and VTEX. Each one of them comes with a module for promotions and discounts, and in this article we want to discuss them.
BigCommerce
The BigCommerce platform has a Marketing module, that includes three main parts:
- SEO;
- Discounts and coupons;
- Email marketing.
In this article, we will discuss the “Discounts and coupons” part. There are several types you can create using BigCommerce, such as:
- Coupon codes: You can create codes that shoppers enter during checkouts. This type of discount applies to categories, subcategories, and products. Customers can get a reduction off the order total, each item, percentage, shipping. They can also get free shipping. The platform allows you to set certain limitations, such as the number of uses per customer, expiration date, location or shipping method.
- Automatic and coupon promotions: These discounts apply to a shopping cart that meets certain parameters, or when the customer uses specific coupon codes. Several types of discounts are with automatic and coupon promotions, such as shipping, product, brand, category, order and customer discounts.
- Bulk pricing: This automatically applies a certain pricing when a set number of products are purchased. Customers can receive a price discount of a certain amount of dollars (or other currencies) off each item, a percentage discount of x% off each item, or a fixed price of X dollars for each item.
- Customer group discounts: Group discounts automatically apply to a set group of shoppers. The types of group discounts are price or percentage discount, or fixed price. This type of discounts can apply to category, products or store wide.
Akinon
Akinon is a headless commerce platform with an API-first and microservice-based architecture.
Akinon offers their customers a Promotion Management Module where they can optimize their digital marketing strategies by using a single platform to create and schedule any promotion, coupon, discount or campaign for selected products or categories, and segmented audiences within sales channels.
You can create multiple promotions for the same product in different campaigns or by excluding low-margin or high-demand products from any promotional campaign, which helps you benefit from full flexibility in all your marketing campaigns.
In addition to this, Akinon has three great features:
- Visual Merchandising: you can organize product categories and pages with a simple drag-and-drop interface that is powered by sorting algorithms. These algorithms order products by certain criteria, such as seller, color, the highest margin, size, etc.
- On-site Search: Akinon offers an optimized on-site search function designed to increase conversion rates and boost revenue.
- Product Configuration: This feature empowers customers to get involved in your digital channels, whether by designing their own shirt or by building their own computer. You can use simple, variant, bundled or customized options.
VTEX
The VTEX platform has a module called Promotions & Taxes, that includes four main parts:
- Campaign audiences;
- Promotions;
- Coupons;
- Taxes.
Let’s take a look at them:
Campaign audiences: here you can create campaign promotions and audiences. A campaign promotion is tied to a campaign audience.
1. Promotions: When you create a promotion, the platform requires you to fill in some information, such as:
- Name of the promotion;
- Status (enabled or disabled);
- Description;
- Expiration date (the start and end date of the promotion. You can also schedule future promotions);
- Recurrence settings (you can configure the recurrence of your campaign promotion according to the day of the week – you can have a campaign all days of the week or some specific days of the week – or time of the day – you can have a promotion all day or at specific times);
- Campaign audience (that you have previously defined);
- Type and amount of the discount (the platform offers multiple types of discount options: nominal to the cart total, nominal shipping, percentage, maximum price per item, percentage shipping, maximum shipping, free shipping, gift, formula-based nominal discount based on the total of the product prices, nominal reward value, percentage reward value or promotional price table. The platform also offers shipping-related types of discounts, such as shipping type, apply discount only to the lowest shipping rate, apply discount only when one of the carriers is chosen by the client, apply to all available shipping options or promotion is highlighted. The promotion module allows you to control and define to which sellers the promotion will apply);
- which items this promotion will apply to;
- restrictions and limitations of use (for customers): how many times the promotion will be applied in your store, how many times per customer, set maximum number of eligible items per cart, apply with other promotions, apply with manual prices.
2. Coupons: You can generate coupon codes that will allow customers to apply a promotion to their shopping cart. The VTEX platform requires your coupons to be associated with a promotion, in order to be valid.
3. Taxes: In this section you can create surcharges and taxes, archive them, and send the item price, with tax shown separately, to the Gateway or the ERP.
E-commerce gives you a lot of options to attract new customers and maintain a good relationship with existing ones. The main purpose of discounts and promotions is to generate revenue and increase sales. If you don’t handle them correctly, you can devalue your entire company. Without analyzing its potential impact, on your online store, this strategy can backfire on you. According to a McKinsey & Co survey, 40% of consumers are more mindful of where they spend their money. The platforms that we have presented here offer you strong Promotion modules that will absolutely help you achieve your goals. In the end, in order to keep customers coming back, make sure that your strategy delivers an excellent customer experience.