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      What is included in the promotion feature?

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      Overview

      Web Shop Manager is excited to announce the expanded functionality to our Coupon system call “Promotion Manager” (PM).  Promotion Manager replaces existing Coupon functionality and encompasses the following type of promotions: coupons, rebates and gift with purchase.


      These promotions can be displayed in the following locations of your site:

      • Homepage Slideshow

      • Above page content

      • Below page content

      • Sidebar

      • Inserted into content

      Before you create promotions you will need to decide several things such as:

      • How long will this promotions be available for use?
      • What type of discount am I going to offer?
      • What do I want for my "unique" promotion code?
      • Will there be any special restrictions for my promotion?

      It is also important to know how you will notify your customer about the promotion.

      When creating your promotions they can be set to inactive to prevent use before you are ready. Another way to prevent usage is to set the start date in the future. As you will see when viewing the Add Promotion form you have several options for the use of the promotion. Each of the options will be discussed in detail below. 

      Once a product is added to the cart the customer will be presented with a promotions code box. At that time they may enter a valid promotion code and click "Apply Promotion Code" or the "Proceed to Checkout" button for the discount to be validated and applied. Note that the promotion field will not appear on your cart unless you have an active promotion that is currently available for the specific date. Each checkout is allowed to use a single promotion.

      Goals

      1. Allow our clients extended functionality to control their promotions across multiple types promotional methods.

      2. Allow our clients a method for setting up their promotions in advance.

      3. Provide flexibility on where our clients can display promotions.

      Assumptions

      1. Anyone that can access coupons can create and/or edit promotions

      2. The existing coupon feature will be enhanced to allow for different types of promotions

      3. Additional work will need to be performed by WSM to initially setup all client templates with the new functionality.

      4. Clients are responsible for uploading the correct image size for the site and area of use. Promotion Manager does not resize any of the images used for promotions.

      Deprecated Functionality

      With the implementation of Promotion Manager the following legacy “Coupon” functionality has been deprecated:

      1. Near Valid Coupons on product an cart page

      2. There is no longer an option to enter a promotion code at the checkout screen. It can only be done in the cart screen

      Feature Availability

      Promotion Manager has 3 different feature levels for Standard, Professional and Premium MTL Customers:

      • Standard - Existing "Coupon" functionality. Customers are able to enter a promotional code at the cart page to receive discounts
      • Professional - All the functionality from Standard level and the additional promotions of Rebate and Gift with Purchase.
      • Premium - All the functionality from the Standard and Professional levels and the addition of adding images and visibility to promotions

      Getting Started

      Finding the Promotion Manager Interface

      The PM interface can be found in the admin portion of your site under the

      Catalog → Promotions tab (See Figure 1).

                                                        Figure 1

       

      Once you enter the Promotions menu, this will be the main interface for the Promotion Manager and will be where you will manage your promotions (See Figure 2).

                                                                                                                               Figure 2

       

      Adding a Promotion

      • To create a new promotion, you will need to press the  Button on the right hand of the screen as seen in Figure 2.

      • The new tab that is opened (Figure 3) is the main individual promotion form and is used for each type of promotion. 

      • Enter in all required information (denoted on screen with a red asterisk) in the "Information" Section as seen in Figure 3.

      Figure 3

      Required Information for all promotions:

      Field

      Figure #

      Description

      Name

      3

      The name is short descriptive text that is displayed to your customers on the cart, checkout and order confirmation email.

      Description

      3

      Describes what your Promotion provides. This field should be used as your short description of the Promotion to give your customers a quick and general understanding. It is also displayed to your customer on the cart, checkout and order confirmation email.

      Starts

      3

      The date you want your promotion to be available for use. It will become available at 12:00 AM on this date. The time zone used for the start date is the time zone you set in your sites Configuration.

      Expires

      3

      The date you want your promotion to end. It will be valid until 11:59 PM on this date.

      Active

      3

      By default your coupon will be set to inactive. Change this to active to allow the coupon to be used for the dates specified above.

      Private

      3

      This will determine if the promotion is visible to customers, or if it is available only to customers that are given the code. If a promotion is marked private, there will be no individual promotion page that a customer can see.

      This setting is secondary to enabling "Show Coupon Code" in System > Configuration > Catalog
      All coupons are private if "Show Coupon Code" is disabled. 

      Priority

      3

      The Priority will control the order in which Promotions are displayed. This field defaults to 500 but it is not required that you modify it beyond this value. The highest priority promotion for each promotion type will be displayed on the promotions.html page.

      Note: For guest checkout to use promotion codes - Restrictions must NOT have any numerical values set

      Options Information for all promotions:

      Field
      Figure #
      Description
      Extended Description 3 The long description of the promotion. It is displayed in as the description text on individual promotion pages. If this is left blank, the required Description field will be used.

      Meta Title

      		 3 Meta title will be captured in the individual promotional pages. This information is not typically seen by customers unless they inspect the page source code.
      Meta Keywords 3 Meta keywords will be captured in the individual promotional pages. This information is not typically seen by customers unless they inspect the page source code.
      Meta Description 3 Meta Description of the promotion which will be captured in the individual promotional pages. This information is not typically seen by customers unless they inspect the page source code.
      Admin Notes 3 Any additional remarks to be added to the promotion. Customers won't see any of this information.

      • Once all the Promotional information is entered, you will need to select the type of promotion you are creating by using the drop-down list in the "Promotion Type" Section (Figure 4).

      Figure 4

      • This form is dynamic and the available fields will change depending on the type of promotion you are creating. The specifics on creating each promotion type can be found in their respective articles.

      • Once you have entered the promotion-specific content, and if you have the Premium version of Promotion Manager, you can add enhanced Visibility with images and locations for where you want your promotions to appear.

      What Promotion Manager doesn't do:

      With the initial rollout of Promotion Manager, there are some features and functionality that we currently don't support. Some of this functionality is being evaluated for future releases of this feature. The information below captures functionality we chose not to support in the current version of Promotion Manager:

      Gift With Purchase (GWP)

      • While the free gift in the GWP promotion can have options (e.g. Small, Medium, Large..), there is no way in the current implementation for a customer to select any of these options. 

      • Discounts due to a GWP promotion are shown in the product line item, but coupon discounts are currently not being shown for an individual product.
      • The Promotion Manager will only show a single promotion in each Visibility location. So if you have multiple active promotions all trying to use the same Visibility location, the Promotion Manager will only show the promotion with the highest priority. Promotion Manager is capable of displaying multiple promotions on the same page if they are in different Visibility locations (Above vs Below vs Sidebar, etc..

      TROUBLESHOOTING

      If the time zone is not set in the System > Configuration > General Tab the promotion field will not appear in the checkout cart

      If you enter an active promotion code and it does not apply - check the Requirements > Promotion Code field - This field must have the Promotion code entered (Typically Matches the Promotion Title)