Promotion Codes

New Promotion Code Functionality in Commerce Server 2002 Feature Pack 1

Shoppers love discounts! When shopping online, you can get percentage-off discounts, dollar-off discounts, click-required discounts, and coupon discounts - just to name a few. Coupon discounts are a very popular way for marketing managers, especially in the retail industry, to promote their products. We kept this in mind when creating Commerce Server 2002 Feature Pack 1 (FP1). The new Marketing System now supports promotion code discounts, which are also commonly referred to as "coupon discounts". Coupon discounts use one or more unique coupon codes that are associated with a discount. While shopping online, if a customer enters a coupon code, they receive a discount for the corresponding item. How cool is that?

Is it difficult for a marketing manager to set up a coupon discount? In Commerce Server 2002 FP1 it's easy! We've created an Add Coupons Wizard in the new Commerce Server 2002 FP1 Discount Manager that you can use to set up coupon discounts. You can specify how many times the shopper can use the coupon, and whether the coupon will be public, private, or restricted.

Here's how the three types of coupon discounts work:

·         Public. Any shopper can enter the coupon code and receive the discount. Only one coupon code is associated with the discount. For example, a public coupon code can trigger a non-personalized shipping discount offered to all shoppers.

·         Private. A coupon code is sent to individual shoppers and those shoppers can forward the offer to other shoppers. No user identity is required to use this discount.

·         Restricted. A coupon code is sent to an individual shopper; that shopper cannot forward the offer to other shoppers. Uniqueness is ensured by an identity entered by the shopper, for example, an e-mail address or trigger number.

You already know that it's important that you're able to put restrictions on your coupons. Restrictions such as time limits, and how many times a coupon can be used keeps online shoppers from taking advantage of your marketing promotions. Using the Add Coupons Wizard, you can set usage limits for each type of coupon code. A usage limit controls the maximum number of times a specific coupon code can be redeemed. The following table lists and explains the new promotion code features available in Commerce Server 2002 FP1.

Generating Promotion codes

How does a manager track how the coupon code is used and who's using it? Commerce Server 2002 FP1 sets a unique promotion code that is generated for each customer's private coupon code. Private coupon codes are generated randomly and consist of a prefix, random code, and postfix. The total length of the code is the length of the prefix, plus the number of random digits, plus the length of the postfix. It's a snap for you to enter the number of random digits in the Coupon Wizard to specify how the coupon code will be generated.

The randomly generated codes contain both letters and numbers so that the codes cannot be guessed by your shoppers. And whoops! You can also avoid offensive word combinations by eliminating vowels from the discount code alphabetic portion. Random generation uses a dictionary file that is externally configurable, which provides finer control over letters used to generate codes. The default dictionary string contains the following characters: 1234567890BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ.

Promotion code reservations

What happens if a customer adds an item to their basket and by the time they go to checkout the promotion code limit is reached, and they don't receive their discount? For example, let's say the first 100,000 users who enter the coupon code "HOLIDAY" receive the discount. Therefore, every time a user receives a discount with a coupon code, the usage count will be incremented. If the usage count is only incremented during checkout, the shopper may not receive the discount for a popular product. It might happen that, when the shopper adds the product to their basket, they see the applied promotion code discount. However, by the time they checkout, the promotion code limit is reached and the discount does not apply. That can make for an unhappy customer.

We've got that covered. Commerce Server 2002 FP1 prevents this type of bad user experience by using promotion code reservations. When a shopper is eligible for a promotion code when adding products to their basket, the promotion is "reserved" for that shopper for a set time interval. If the shopper checks out within the time-out interval, the reservation is held for that shopper. If the shopper does not check out, then the reservation expires and the discount may or may not apply. Pretty slick!

To use this to the best advantage, you need to ensure that a promotion code reservation does not perpetually apply. The codes must be expired at a regular time-out interval. Commerce Server 2002 FP1 has this covered as well. We ship this task out of the box; you just need to schedule manually using Windows task scheduler or similar service.

You can schedule the promotion code reservation task using the Windows Task Scheduler service with the ExpirePromoCodeReservations command-line tool provided in Commerce Server 2002 FP1. The ExpirePromoCodeReservations tool uses the following syntax:

ExpirePromoCodeReservations.exe <sitename>

Where the <sitename> parameter is the name of your site. The tool reads the configuration settings for the site, including the connection string and the expiration time in minutes, and calls a stored procedure to update the promotion code history and transactions tables to time-out expired reservations.

You will want to schedule the task to run at an interval slightly less than the promotion code reservation expiration time. For example, if the promotion code reservation expiration time is set to 30 minutes (the default), you should set the recurrence to 20 minutes. Read on for the particulars.

The promotion code reservation task contains the following details:

·         Location:<drive>:\Program Files\Microsoft Commerce Server 2002\FP1\ExpirePromoCodeReservations.exe

·         Usage: ExpirePromoCodeReservations.exe <Site name>

The promotion code reservation task does the following:

·         Takes the site name as a parameter.

·         Reads the configuration settings for the site, including connection string and expiration time, in minutes.

·         Removes the expired reservations.

To effortlessly schedule a promotion code reservation task, here's what you do:

1.      Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.

2.      From the Control Panel, double-click Scheduled Tasks, and then double-click Add Scheduled Task.

The Scheduled Task Wizard appears, which guides you through the steps to schedule the task.

If you want to explore this further, there's lots more information about Commerce Server 2002 FP1 promotion code functionality. Just look in the "Promotion Codes" topic in Commerce Server 2002 FP1 Help, which is shipped with the product.

Happy shopping!