What We'll Cover

Automatic Promotions are a way to set up product discounts based on whether the customer's shopping cart has met specific criteria, such as including certain products or brands, reaching a set order amount, or even whether the customer has purchased before. Shoppers won't need to enter in a coupon code, as the promotion is automatically applied, leading to less friction on the checkout.

Sales are easy to schedule in advance, as promotions can be created with a set start and end date. This allows you to focus on promoting your sale through social media and email marketing, rather than manually managing the promotion in the control panel.

Due to the nature of Automatic Promotions, they will not be apparent to the customer until after they have added products to their cart. For this reason, we recommend advertising your discounts with a marketing banner or on your store's carousel.

The advanced editor offers additional functionality for creating promotions. Exclude promotions, limit promotions to certain days or weeks, create fixed price promotions, and more. See Advanced Promotions for more information.

Shipping discounts

Just so you know... If your discount conflicts with your shipping zone setup, the promotion will take priority over the shipping zone rule.

Product discounts

To learn more about this discount, see Creating Product Level Discounts.

Brand discounts

Category discounts

Order discounts

Customer discounts

Offering a free item? If you are using one of the Buy One Get One discounts, there will be an additional option to add any eligible free product automatically to the shopper's cart. By default, this option is enabled. If you disable it, shoppers will need to click the eligible banner prompt on the cart page and manually add the free product to their cart.

Go to Marketing › Promotions to see your active and disabled promotions in the Promotions Manager.

In addition to the list of promotions, you can also see the following statistics and settings:

Use the tabs to filter your promotions and view only active or inactive promotions. By default, you will see all promotions. You can also filter by currency, using the dropdown menu. You will find all of the currencies set up under Settings › Currencies available as filters. This allows you to combine the two sets of filters for even greater precision, such as only displaying active promotions available to customers using Canadian Dollars.

Use the search field to search by promotion name. This is extremely useful if your store has more than one page of promotions or when you're looking for a specific promotion.

Multiple promotions can run on qualifying orders. For example, you have a promotion that gives them 10% after spending $20, and another that gives them 50% if they spend $75. If the shopper spends $100, they qualify for both discounts.

The sequence in which the promotions are arranged is the progression in which they will be run for each order. To rearrange the order that promotions are applied, click Manage promotion priorities, then click and drag promotions up or down in the list. If Stop after this rule is checked, none of the promotions below it will run if that specific promotion is triggered. This works to prevent multiple promotions from combining, as seen in the example above.

To create an automatic promotion, go to Marketing › Promotions and click New Automatic Promotion.

Enter a Promotion Name and select which currency the promotion will affect (for percentage-based discounts, you can also optionally apply the discount to "All Currencies"). The promotion name is an internal name that you can use to keep track of your discounts.

Select a Promotion Type. This is the category of promotion you want to set up, then select the individual discount you wish to use. See Types of Automatic Promotions above for a full list of discounts and promotion types.

If you are using a promotion that requires additional information, such as selecting a particular product or category, add that information now. You can also discount a product with options and SKUs.

Select All Customers or a specific Customer Group. Use this to specify which customers are eligible to receive the promotion. For example, you may want to limit the discount to wholesale, high-value, or new customers. For more information, see Customer Groups.

Choose the promotion's Duration. Use this to specify a start date and time for your promption to run. Select your start date from the calendar, and the start time from the dropdown. Click Add end date to specify a date and time for the promotion to expire, then set the date and time. Promotions will use the time zone in your Date and Timezone Settings. For more on the Duration feature, see Duration Dates and Times.

You can limit discounts to a certain number of uses by enabling the Limit the usage of this discount option.

You can limit discounts to not apply to items with sale pricing by enabling the Exclude Items on Sale option. This option is only available for Product, Brand, and Category promotion types.

Click Activate to make your promotion begin taking effect. Unchecking it will disable the promotion, but keep it in your control panel for later use.

The duration settings allow you to set a specific period during which your promotion should run. When selecting your date period, keep the following in mind:

Promotion messaging can be placed in various areas of the store to upsell, announce eligibility, and congratulate shoppers. The banners will trigger only if the shopper meets the parameters of the discount and if content has been added to the appropriate banners. Only one banner will display at a time for a specific promotion at the different stages of eligibility and application of the discount.

Promotion banners are optional and utilize the WYSIWYG Editor so they can include images and links to specific pages. You can also use placeholders to inject certain information into the banners.

By default, the banners will take on the theme's styling and look like this:

This banner displays on the cart page when the shopper has qualified for the discount, and it has been applied.

This banner displays on the cart page when a shopper meets the conditions to qualify for a promotion, but must add the reward to the cart themselves. It's useful for Buy One Get Something Else free situations, where the shopper needs to select options before adding the reward item to the cart.

This banner can be placed on the home, product, cart, and checkout pages. The message appears when a shopper has added something to their cart but does not qualify for a discount yet.

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The promotional banner is used to upsell products that are unrelated to what a shopper has already added to their cart, and will show when products that aren't part of the promotion have been added to the cart. It will not appear for empty carts or carts that meet the requirements of another promotion, such as free shipping for orders over a certain amount.

These placeholders can be used in the above message boxes. Some placeholders only apply to certain Discount types.

What do promotions look like to customers?

When your customer goes through checkout, they will see a discounted price showing how much their order was discounted. It will not show on the product or category pages.

Will Automatic Promotions affect gift certificates?

No. Gift certificates are excluded from Automatic Promotions.

How do I create a product discount automatic promotion?

Go to Marketing › Promotions and click New Automatic Promotion. Choose Product discount as the promotion type, then choose Apply an amount or % off to Product X. The Add Free Product automatic promotion will only become available when the percent off per unit is set to 100%. Save your changes.

How do Automatic Promotions interact with manual discounts?

Manual discounts are applied when creating a manual order or when editing an existing order.

How does rounding work with percentage-based discounts?

Percentage-based discounts use normal rounding. We round down for 0.004 and less, and round up for 0.005 and greater.

Why aren't some of my promotion's banners appearing on the storefront?

Certain promotion types will not display all banners to shoppers on your storefront. A promotion that does not have eligibility conditions, such as one that applies a category discount without a minimum purchase amount, will display the promotional and congratulations banners. However, the upsell and eligible banners won't appear since the discount is applied automatically.