Potential Promotions – Why they are useful and how to set them up with parameter insights

[Charles_Ohene]

The problem: A regular promotion only shows up in the cart page when it finally applies, but frankly speaking, this spoils the idea of a promotion to attrackt buyers to buy more. In fact, it often appears like a nice but kind of random benefit, unfortunately displayed AFTER the buyer already bought enough to fulfil the promotional pre-condition.

The typical solution would be to announce promotions visually in the storefront via a banner component. Fine. But this usually does not catch all promotions and includes extra efforts to adjust the storefront. These adjustments are done by web content managers, which need extra coordination and communication with the business users responsible for the promotion creation.

An additional way to announce a promotion BEFORE it applies is already built into our promotion engine since ages: Potential promotions.
Think of it as an “announcing” promotion to hint to the main promotion. A typical example would be: “Your cart is only 11,23 USD apart from free shipping”.
The good news: The business user who created the main promotion (like 100 USD cart qualifies for free shipping) can create the corresponding potential promotion e.g. starting from 80 USD to motivate the customer to reach a 100 USD cart.

As said, potential promotions often come in conjunction with e.g. a banner saying: Free shipping for any cart beyond 100 USD.

Let’s pick an example to explain the mandatory steps:

1st step – Create the main promotion:
Afterwards, we create the potential promotion and assign it to the main promotion.

I assume you already know how to create a regular promotion, thus keeping it short by creating a promotion rule out of the “order_threshold_free_gift” template in Backoffice under Marketing / Promotion Templates.
Afterwards, we edit it under Marketing / Promotion Rules:
Name:            MainPromo_BuyOver100USD_GetFreeShipping
Website:         electronicsPromoGrp
Priority:          100
Rule Group:   orderPromotionRuleGroup

Please note that the orderPromotionRuleGroup is not exclusive, allowing the execution of more than one promotion in that group at the same time. Thus we set the priority of the main promotion higher than the one of the potential promotion. This ensures, that the main promotion is evaluated first and that the potential promotion is not displayed any more as soon as the main promotion is triggered.

Under Conditions & Actions Tab

Conditions:
Set Condition to: Cart total >= 100 USD.

Actions:
Delete the Action: Free gift (we don’t need it, free shipping is enough)
Drag-and-drop action: Change delivery mode and select free-standard-shipping.

Info Message (on top):
Exchange the Info Message with:
Congratulations! You received free standard shipping, because you bought over 100 USD.

Save your new created main promotion and publish it to promotions-module.

2nd step – Creating the potential promotion:

We reuse some properties and the name from the main promotion with a different prefix, but create the promotion rule from scratch without using a template:
Code & Name:          PotentialPromo_BuyOver100USD_GetFreeShipping

After saving, we open it for further configuration:
Website:                     electronicsPromoGrp
Priority:                      50 (must be less than the main promotion)
Rule Group:               orderPromotionRuleGroup

Please note again that we defined the priority of the main promotion higher than the one of this potential promotion to ensure that the potential promotion is not displayed any more as soon as the main promotion is triggered. We want it showing up only between 80-100 USD in the end.

Under Conditions & Actions Tab

Conditions:
Drag-and-drop 1st condition: Rule executed.
As Action rule, select your main promotion.
Set “Action rule execution allowed” to false.

This condition associates your potential promotion to the main promotion and ensures that your main promotion is not executed when the potential one triggers. Instead, we only trigger to display a message starting from 80 USD:
Drag-and-drop 2nd condition: Cart total.
Set Condition to: Cart total >= 80 USD.

Actions:
Drag-and-drop action: Trigger rule message (cart total threshold).
As Action rule, select your main promotion.
Set “Cart total threshold” to 100 USD.

This action defines the upper boundary of the potential promotion. In addition it dynamically calculates at runtime the delta between the current cart value and the given 100 USD threshold. That delta is provided as a variable and shown when clicking on the ?-icon.
In my environment, it is named 36002d74-769c-40a4-aef9-01e1fcee86db. We can use it for the text message displayed on the cart page in the storefront when the potential promotion triggers. Thus we add it in curly braces to the message.

Info Message (on top):
Exchange the Info Message with:
Just spend another {36002d74-769c-40a4-aef9-01e1fcee86db} to receive free standard shipping.

Finally, save your new created potential promotion and publish it to promotions-module.
Congratulations, you just set up a potential promotion.

Let’s review the effects on the storefront:

1st: When putting items to the cart BELOW the 80 USD threshold of the potential promotion, nothing special shows up on the “Add to cart” popup or the cart page itself.

2nd: When putting items to the cart MATCHING the 80-100 USD threshold of the potential promotion, it shows up on the “Add to cart” popup and also on the cart page.

3rd: When putting items to the cart ABOVE the 80-100 USD threshold of the potential promotion, it shows up on the “Add to cart” popup and also on the cart page.

That concludes my discourse on potential promotions, why they are useful and how to set them up with parameter insights. I hope you found this first blog article of my life somewhat useful.

Additional resources:

If you just want a quick click through guide of how to create another potential promotion see here: SAP Help Portal.

System used:

SAP Commerce Cloud 2211.29 (but any 2211 version will also work)