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Top 2024 resources on promotions

Best promotions resource in 2024.
Learn more about promotions to improve your e-commerce strategy.

  • 10 Ways to Create Customer Centric Promotions in Elastic Path Commerce Cloud - Consumers are always searching for the purchase with the best value, and as such, promotional offers play a significant role in a customer’s shopping cycle. According to the Retailmenot Survey: 80% of consumers feel more encouraged to make a purchase with a new brand if they have offers and discounts 74% of consumers say offers are a top factor when deciding where and what to buy 48% of consumers said they would avoid brands that did not provide offers. With such a heavy precedence on promotional offers, it is imperative to be equipped with a variety of promotions available within your eCommerce solution. At Elastic Path, our engineering teams understand this need and have continued to update and add new promotions for our customers to leverage. In this article we will highlight 10 ways we support your promotional needs and demonstrate where you can access them in the platform’s Commerce Manager.   Cart-Level Promotions 1. Fixed Discount Promotions Cart-Level Fixed discounts allow your team to reduce the product price by a fixed amount, and is applied to the entire cart. This means you can offer a $10 reduction in price and have it applied to the cart total.   2. Percentage Discount Promotions Similarly to fixed discounts, Cart-Level Percentage discounts can also be applied to the entire cart. This promotion allows you to reduce the product price by a specific percentage such as 10% off. In addition to being able to add fixed and percentage discounts, our team has also made updates to allow for the exclusion of specific SKUs from each type of promotion. This means a seller will have the ability to run store-wide promotions and exclude one more SKUs. This can be of great use when you want to exclude specific tiered or exclusive products within your catalog.       Item Level Promotions 3. X for Y Discount Promotions The X for Y discount allows your team to offer bulk discounts based on the unit price. This promotion works by applying the price of Y (qty) to the X(qty). This a great use for “2 For 1” promotions.     4. X for amount Discount Promotions Similarly to the X for Y discount, the X for amount discount allows your team to offer a bulk discount based on a fixed price. This promotion works by applying a set ($) amount to a specific (qty) amount for a specific SKU. This promotion can be used to deploy “2 phones for $500 sales.”     5. Bundle Discount Promotions Bundle discounts allow your team to offer bulk discounts when selected products are purchased together. This promotion works by selecting SKUs and quantities, and applying a bundled price to it. An example of this promotion could look like offering your customers to buy any two items from a specific list at a specific price of $100.     6. Item Fixed Discounts Item Fixed discounts allow your team to reduce the price of multiple items by a fixed amount. In addition to providing a price reduction, it also allows you to limit the discount to a discrete number of items. For example, you will be able to offer $5.00 off a specific SKU like a shirt, and at the same time only allow the discount to be applied to the first 3 items (of the same SKU), leaving the 4th item(of the same SKU) added to cart as full price.     7. Percentage Item Discounts Similarly to Item Fixed discounts, Percent Item Discounts allow your team to reduce the price of multiple items by a specific percentage amount such as 10%. Your team will still be able to limit the discount to a discrete number of items.     8. Free Gift Discount Free Gift discounts allow your teams to offer a free item when a specific product or a group of products are purchased. You will also have the option to either send your customers a notification for them to add the free gift to the cart rather than having it automatically added only. This feature is especially helpful by limiting unwanted items being sent to your customers and creating an overall better shopping experience.     9. Usage Per Line Item Discount Usage Per Line Item promotions grant your team the ability to set usage per line item for all promotion times. This allows you to limit the buyer to use the promotion for a specific number of times. This type of promotion can be useful in giving your employees or influencers a discount with a quantity limit which can be used throughout the year and at multiple checkouts.     10. Max Application Per Cart Limit This promotion update allows your team to limit the quantity available for purchase at the promotion price. This type of promotion stops the risk of someone purchasing an exuberant quantity of an item at sale price.   As Elastic Path continues to innovate and make updates to our promotions engine, we will continue to keep you in the loop. Keep a lookout for upcoming promotions on the roadmap such as editable promotions, node category discounts, notification of available promos and more. In the meantime, stay up to date with our changelog and never get left behind on our newest innovations to Elastic Path Commerce Cloud.
    Topics: cloud, discounts, item, promotions, elastic, path, create, commerce, promotion, discount, team, allow, specific, price, fixed, centric, ways, customer.
  • 7 Tried-and-true Free Shipping Promotions to Drive Holiday Sales - A free shipping offer is a powerful ecommerce promotion. It can boost conversion rates and increase average order values. Like other forms of advertising and promotion, free shipping is an expense. ...
    Topics: pay, business, ecommerce, sales, promotions, drive, shipping, holiday, willing, triedandtrue, free, order, offer, shoppers.
  • 7 Ways to Analyze Black Friday, Cyber Monday Sales - Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are complete. Marketers should scrutinize the results for insights on future promotions. There are multiple approaches. In this post, I'll review seven ways to analyze the results from Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
    Topics: sales, black, overall, example, analyze, profit, cyber, future, online, promotions, ways, customers.
  • - Alibaba and JD launched their annual 6.18 mid-year shopping festivals, which will mark China’s largest online retail promotion since the outbreak of Covid-19.
    Topics: launch, taobao, luxury, midyear, sales, campaign, jd, hours, worth, shopping, promotions, tmall, participating, alibaba.
  • Developer Diaries: MexBS - Interview with Sveta Oksen, CEO at MexBS, about the company’s wide range of Magento extensions.
    Topics: promotions, extension, customers, diaries, marketplace, create, magento, developer, merchants, coupons, extensions, mexbs, market.
  • Four Cyber Week and Black Friday Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Businesses - The online holiday shopping season is going to be bigger than ever. Ready to grow? See 4 proven, high-impact marketing strategies you can start right away!
    Topics: marketing, customers, emails, cyber, site, pages, strategies, promotions, black, visitors, ecommerce, week, businesses.
  • Getting Started with Promotions Based on Product Attributes - In today’s market, increasing customer satisfaction and retention cannot be done without an effective promotional strategy. Convert Cart reports that 80% of customers end up making a first-time purchase after receiving an offer. This means that you’re missing out on revenue if you do not have an effective promotional merchandising strategy. At Elastic Path, we understand the challenges merchandisers face to deliver innovative product experiences, including eCommerce promotions. As you manage the myriad of SKUs and merchandising strategies, creating promotions can be a time consuming endeavor if you don’t have flexible functionality. That is why we have released attribute-based promotions in Commerce Manager, our business user tooling. Create Attribute-Based Promotions with Ease What are product attributes? They are the features that describe a product such as color, size, texture, brand, etc. Attribute-based promotions is a way to allow users to navigate an eCommerce store through product filter and search. It gives merchandisers the ability to dynamically include or exclude groups of products in a promotion based on a specific attribute, without custom development or time-consuming manual work.  For example, you want to run a promotion for all red and green shirts for a Christmas sale. You’d create a promotion based on the red and green attribute. However, you don’t want to offer promotions on silk tops. You could simply exclude all products with the “silk’ attribute. This functionality is available for percent discount, fixed discount, amount-based discount, and line-item discount promotions.  No longer will you have to go through the tedious manual process of including and excluding items within a promotion. You can now simply add your preferred attributes in Commerce Manager, choose to include or exclude specific attributes based on your promotion strategy, and those items will be eliminated or included in the promotion.   This enhancement saves merchandising teams time and money while ensuring that customers see the product experience they expect. In other words, the right products at the right price. This new feature builds on recently released hierarchy-based promotions which gives merchandisers the ability to include or exclude categories or subcategories (hierarchies and nodes) in your promotions. Now, your merchandising team can combine attribute-based promotions and hierarchy-based promotions in one single promotion.  EP Product Experience Manager (PXM) Merchandise Every Unique Product Experience, Without Custom Dev Work Go to EP PXM Implement Attribute-Based Promotions for Any Use Case So, why does this matter for merchandising teams? In short, merchandisers can quickly and easily create unique promotion strategies. Let’s say you’re a clothing brand that would like to create a promotion within your women’s clothing catalog. It is an end of summer sales promotion, so you would like to put all shirts on sale except for long-sleeved knit shirts. As you create a new promotion in Commerce Manager, you can click “add exclude” in the promotion and type in the components so this product is excluded from site promotions and discounts.  All this can be done in a matter of minutes. Let’s take a look at this example in action: Attribute-based promotions are a great way to configure promotions for specific products quickly. At Elastic Path, we will continue to serve merchandisers with product innovations that drive revenue and conversion and help you create innovative product experiences with ease.
    Topics: promotions, create, exclude, merchandisers, manager, product, attributes, getting, merchandising, discount, based, started, promotion, attributebased.
  • Holiday Social Media Tips for Fashion, Lifestyle Merchants - To entice holiday shoppers to come to a smaller store instead of, say, a leading brand, go the extra mile — from product selection to customer service to unique marketing, including social media campaigns. Organize social media holiday campaigns by channels, such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest
    Topics: gift, fashion, campaigns, customers, merchants, promotions, tips, holiday, shoppers, media, products, videos, social, lifestyle.
  • Instagram Promotions: How to Create One in Minutes + 3 Best Practices - Instagram marketing can be a hit or miss. Especially as you start implementing your social media strategy, it might take a while for your posts to start performing well.
    Topics: post, promotions, create, users, instagram, minutes, goal, best, ad, practices, posts, promotion, page, youre, audience.
  • More Is Not Better: How to Effectively Target Retail Promotions - Relevance and value build a loyal customer base.
    Topics: promotion, promotions, customers, retail, retailers, better, coupon, effectively, target, person, shoppers, send, email, coupons.
  • Predicting Profits from Black Friday Promotions - The Black Friday weekend is near. Many merchants will lower prices, add promotions, and compete in one of the biggest retail days of the year. By analyzing prior year results, merchants can estimate current-year sales and profits and the impact of promotions.
    Topics: x, promotions, profit, average, sales, promotion, predicting, lift, increase, profits, promotional, black, product.
  • Product Content Management & Merchandising: Product Design - Merchandisers: We see you. Our goal at Elastic Path is to solve your eCommerce problems. As merchandizers you are tasked with maintaining product and responding to customer and business demand through analysis and insights. No easy feat, especially now more than ever in a highly competitive digital commerce landscape with half the time to complete twice the tasks. UX/UI Informed Design We lean on best practices when designing products for the busy merchandiser such as the proven tenets of User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design. I like to think of UX/UI design as an iceberg. Not of the cold, Titanic-leveling variety; but more of a multi-layered and powerful creation that is more than meets the eye. Think of UX as end-to-end workflow, and UI as usability; or how you interact with the visual components of the platform to accomplish the workflow. At its surface, the UI gives us the look and feel of the site; both the graphic and visual design to support the branding, and the ease of navigation. But slip down a level into where the UX begins; where functions like scope and structure live, and the all-important strategy; the how you accomplish your business objectives each and every day. Improve workflows, reduce pain points As a merchandiser your world is product management, data, and analytics. You have catalogs and price books to manage, promotions, SKUs, and the task of how best to market what you have in what limited time you have to do it. We study your business needs and create personas to get a better understanding of workflows and how to solve your pain points. Your daily struggles may involve adjusting categories, setting up repeat promotions, testing changes, or managing data to gain insight into customers’ buying habits. We study these pain points and come up with core design principles for our products that address problems head on; what you’re looking for is a platform to manage all these specific tasks with a high level of flexibility, accuracy, and consistency. Our success is your success Our product’s success depends on you. We look at behavioral and attitudinal aspects of how you interact with the product: how fast did you learn a task? How many features did you use? How satisfied were you overall with its performance? We may also look at a system usability score (SUS) or a net promoter score (NPS) to gauge and further document satisfaction. Always improving always testing From there we work to improve the product. How can we improve on existing features in the long and short term like account management, data visualization, promotions, or how new team members onboard with the platform? Our goal is to continually improve, so you and your customers get the most value from a system that grows with you. How we partner with our customers Observation and Contextual Interviewing – We watch, listen, and ask questions to better understand how you’re using the product and directly address needs and gaps Concept Testing – Your input directly affects product improvement and testing Customer Success – We have a dedicated team to your feedback and success What does this mean for merchandisers? You get the latest in product innovation. Real solutions for your problems, with the full support of our product and customer success teams. Our new functionality, Catalog Composer, offers more flexibility and speed to manage complex catalogs across brands, geos, touchpoints, and business models 5 times faster than more rigid tools of the past. You don’t need additional development work, or potentially messy customizations and workarounds to manage multiple catalogs as you scale from week, to month, to year. I invite you to take a tour and see for yourself the power and flexibility of this tool, and how it can transform your eCommerce playbook.
    Topics: products, ux, content, promotions, business, problems, management, merchandising, platform, product, ui, manage, design, success.
  • Running Sales and Holiday Promotions Without Deep Discounts - If you’re considering running a promotion over the holidays, have you stopped to work out if you can actually afford it? It’s the right question to ask upfront because not every online store operates with profit margins that allow for discounts (let alone deep ones of 50% or more). Plus: setting up and running a […]
    Topics: items, buy, free, customers, deep, shipping, promotions, running, product, holiday, store, discount, offer, discounts, sales.
  • SEO: 5 Tips to Convert Visitors to Buyers - Search engine optimization focuses on driving consumers to your site. But traffic alone doesn't pay the bills. Success depends on converting those visitors to customers. Use these five tips to convert more searchers into buyers.
    Topics: sites, buyers, convert, search, tips, help, page, product, searchers, site, seo, reviews, visitors, promotions, brand.
  • Setting Up ‘Promotions’ in Google Shopping - The new promotion feature in Google Shopping can help an ad stand out with a blue “Special offer” link. Once clicked, the offer appears as a popup. It's a good way to move past the typical components of a Shopping ad: product name, price, brand, and image.
    Topics: shopping, google, id, form, good, merchant, ads, feature, setting, promotions, promotion.
  • Spy on Competitors to Improve Products and Promotions - Spying on your ecommerce competition can help with product pricing and marketing strategy. The first step is to identify all competitors no matter how large or small. Once you’ve compiled ...
    Topics: traffic, spy, pricing, product, help, competitors, email, improve, search, promotions, marketing, products.
  • The Beginner’s Guide to Running Sales and Promotions on Your Ecommerce Store - These best practices for running sales and promotions on your ecommerce store will help you drum up consumer interest & get more sales!
    Topics: promotions, sales, price, products, units, customers, need, discount, customer, store, beginners, sold, discounts, running, guide, online.
  • Tips for using your credit card during the Hot Sale - Paying by credit card at the Hot Sale can be advantageous due to the additional discounts that brands can provide.
    Topics: safe, using, card, tips, promotions, credit, sale, purchases, buy, payment, hot, online, pandemic.
  • Top 6 eCommerce Promotion Types to Win the Customer - eCommerce promotions play a part in the differentiated digital commerce experiences that brands strive for in today’s saturated market. Sweetening the offer at just the right moment can turn the experience from just browsing to converting. When you have less than 15 seconds to keep a customer interested in your app the action must be anything if not intentional. Let’s look at a few methods and strategies as you evaluate promotions in your e-Commerce business: 1. Loyalty Programs Eighty-one percent of traditional loyalty program members would join a premium loyalty program at their favorite retailer if the benefits were valuable. Consider this when evaluating a loyalty program for your brand; and take note that getting a new customer is 7 times more expensive than convincing an existing customer to buy again. The difference is buying behavior. You have a leg up on an existing customer given the data you’ve collected. Crafting custom offers to entice along every step of the buying journey is your ace in the hole. What traditionally looked like racking up points towards future purchases has evolved based on data analytics; you may consider putting the power back in the customers’ hands to exchange points for a select offer of their choosing such as a discount towards one of their favorite products or product category. Consider investing in CRM or loyalty software vendors if you haven’t already to further streamline your promotions, and one that will easily integrate within an e-Commerce platform. 2. Bundling Given you can afford the margins on bundling, it’s one of the easier ways to create value among your customers. Having a system in place to build out special pricing and manage inventory is key. Aside from that, the data will inform the story. Bundling and custom offers like BOGO (Buy one, get one) work well when you evaluate your product assortment and its performance. Consider using this tactic with more popular items or bestsellers as a way of introducing new products from the same brand or product family. Bundling is useful when upselling or cross-selling items within a category and can also be of considerable value to a customer when packaged as a gift to commemorate a holiday or occasion. You save your customer time and money, two coveted commodities they will reward you for in loyalty. Elastic Path enables bundling within the platform and supports thousands of product variations to power up your merchandising strategy. Interested in Learning More About Elastic Path Commerce Cloud Promotion Capabilities? eCommerce Promotions, when executed correctly, capitalize on the online consumer behavior, which helps you to continuously boost sales and customer loyalty despite the competition. Go to Promotions 3. Engage Your Customers The key to keeping a customer is to engage. The most highly visible ways are to engage when customers are entering or leaving your site. But consider the power of personalization; using the goldmine of information you have on your customers, craft an offer based on their shopping behaviors. Phrase the offer in an email with exclusivity; a VIP customer deserves a VIP offer. You may have seen such offers in the wild with an invitation to return; from we haven’t seen you in a while, to sorry to see you go, these offers correspond to bringing the customer back in the buying loop with an enticing discount or email/pop-up code. 4. eCommerce Carts Above all, keep it simple for your customers. The cart should be always in the line of sight, and when it comes time to checkout don’t require a login. If the customer wishes to checkout as a guest, so be it. Cart abandonment is real, but the numbers range from 50-80% depending on who you talk to; even so those number are high enough to warrant a strategy. What to avoid? Silos. In an omnichannel experience that customers demand, you need to reach them in the way they prefer. Yes, you can sweeten the deal with a discount code as an exit trigger, but it will fall flat if the mode of delivery isn’t tailored to the individual. 5. Leverage Social Media Social media influences buying decisions so it’s crucial to have a presence there, but also reach out to shoppers via social media with offers and marketing. By 2021, the global social commerce market will increase by about 34%, and further researcher forecasts that e-sales will exceed $735 billion by 2023. Consider shoppable ads such as what you’d see in-app from Pinterest or Instagram. These ads show the product and offer links to purchase without leaving the site. Social media affords you the opportunity to engage with influencers and provide additional authenticity to your brand. Consider unique promo codes for your social shoppers only; personalized offers to this segment create even more trust and meet the demand of where and how today’s shopper completes the purchase. 6. Sign Up Offer Offers to garner email addresses can be risky since you don’t know the shopper’s behavior yet. In this instance, consider the offer. Is it a promo code for a discount off the initial purchase? Is it buy one and get a gift card? Or maybe it’s buy one and get one at a reduced price. In any case, do the research into your offers and inventory and see what works best for your business model, in exchange for the opportunity to grow your email base. Always Be Testing This statement rings true across functions; from development to operations to marketing. When strategizing on promotions, consider your goals, and the information you currently have about your customers. A mix of promotions staged throughout a calendar year, across the sales cycle, and across channels is the best bet; and always, always, allow the data to inform your decisions. Your customer will let you know what is best.
    Topics: customers, loyalty, consider, promotions, promotion, types, social, product, offers, customer, win, ecommerce, offer.
  • Using Google Analytics to Track On-site Promotions - Measuring the impact of banners and promotional links on the home page and other key pages can be challenging. In this post, I will provide instructions for identifying on-site banners and other key links that drive clicks and conversions
    Topics: onsite, promotions, events, internal, google, track, promotional, page, reporting, analytics, revenue, clicks, tracking, using.