Exploring Standard Promotions in SAP Commerce Cloud

Chris, our Marketing Manager, needs to design effective promotional campaigns to boost sales. Understanding the various promotion types available within SAP Commerce Cloud is crucial for creating targeted and successful marketing strategies. This lesson will equip Chris with the knowledge to identify and utilize these promotion types effectively.

SAP Commerce Cloud comes with two engines that process promotions: a promotion engine and a rule engine. These engines use Rule Aware Objects (RAOs), which determine what and how objects can be affected in a promotion.

The details of how both engines and RAOs work needn’t concern us in this course. However, it is useful to understand that not everything in SAP Commerce Cloud can be used in promotions without additional development work. If there are Rule Aware Objects, it follows that other objects will not be "rule aware."

But don’t worry—Chris can do a lot with the standard promotions available. To give you an idea of what is possible, we have categorized some of the most common promotions according to where they can take effect:

1. Order Threshold or Cart Promotions: Affect the cart and are triggered once a cart has reached a certain value. This can be independent of what exactly is being purchased.

2. Product Promotions: Affect products and can be tied to individual products or entire categories of products.

3. Bundle Promotions: Affect products that are bundled together. For example, buy products A, B, and C together for price X.

4. Partner-Product Promotions: Affect products when bought in combination with other products. Customers buy product A and get product B at a reduced price.

5. Coupon Promotion: Can affect carts or products and customers must enter a specific code to receive a particular benefit.

6. Target Customer Group Promotion: Affect carts but only for specific segments of a company’s customer base.

7. Customer Support Promotions: Are only effective in support scenarios and are used by Customer Support Agents when interacting with customers.

Each of these previously introduced promotion categories contains a number of different promotions that are already available with SAP Commerce Cloud. Of course, customers or partners can extend the functionality of SAP Commerce Cloud and add further promotion types during their implementation projects.

Each of these standard promotions will come with a specific effect. These effects can be roughly grouped as follows:

Percentage Discounts - These effects will reduce the price for one or more products, or a cart, by a fixed percentage. This can be used for promotion categories:

• Threshold (Cart) Promotions
• Product Promotions
• Partner-Product Promotions
• Coupon Promotions
• Customer Support Promotions
• Target Customer Group Promotions

Fixed Discounts - One or more products or an entire cart get a fixed deduction in total price, for example, 10$. This can be used for promotion categories:

• Threshold (Cart) Promotions
• Product Promotions
• Partner-Product Promotions
• Coupon Promotions
• Target Customer Group Promotions

Fixed Prices - Products are available at a fixed price. This is often used in scenarios where multiples of products need to be bought, or different products need to be purchased in combination.

• Product Promotions
• Partner-Product Promotions
• Bundle Promotions

Free Items - This will grant a customer a free product or a free coupon. Promotions like these are used with:

• Threshold (Cart) Promotions
• Partner-Product Promotions
• Coupon Promotions

As we have seen, there are many different promotions available in SAP Commerce Cloud. Companies usually run many promotions simultaneously and constantly remove, change, or add new ones. As such, it is important for Marketing Managers like Chris not to constantly have to start from scratch when creating a promotion.

To help with efficiency, SAP Commerce Cloud offers Promotion Templates, which allow basic configurations to be saved and reused.

These templates can be found under Marketing (1) in the Promotion Templates (2) node. Here, Chris can see a list of all available templates (3) and create a new template by clicking on the plus icon (4).

Creating Promotions from Templates

To create a new promotion from one of the available templates, Chris must choose the Promotion Template he would like to use (1).

This enables him to:

• Create a new promotion based on the selected template by clicking the plus icon (2), which is a common use case since the new promotion inherits default properties from the template, making the process quicker and easier.
• Edit the template’s details (3); however, please note that any changes made to the template will also impact all future promotions created from it.

• There are standard promotions available out-of-the-box with SAP Commerce Cloud, but more can be added in implementation projects.

• Promotions can be categorized into cart, product, coupon, product-bundle, partner-product, customer support, and customer group-specific promotions.

• Promotions can trigger percentage or fixed value discounts, offer fixed prices, coupons, or free gifts.

• Promotions can be based on templates to boost efficiency.