Increase your sales with online promotions in your Magento store

Having a sale, giving a discount for new customers, or creating a discount voucher is an excellent way of boosting sales to your online shop. Magento comes with an excellent set of tools for creating discount rules quickly and easily. There are two types of rules in Magento, Catalog and Shopping Cart Price Rules. The difference is Catalog Rules are applied to products before they are added to your shoppers cart where as Shopping Cart Price Rules are applied to the shopping cart.

Here we will give you an example on how to set up a Catalog Price Rule, if you dont have a Magento store but want to try it out, take a look at our demo store

To create a Catalog Price Rule go to Promotions » Catalog Price Rules and click the Add New Rule button.

We then get a form to fill out asking for some information on the rule. The first thing is the Name and Description and once that is set up select Active from the Status dropdown. You can also select what website and what customer groups the rule applies to. You can also select a date range for the Rule to take effect, or if you leave the date range empty the rule will be enabled as soon as it is saved.

You can also set the priority. The priority is there in case a product has two separate Catalog Price Rules. Whichever has the priority (1 being the most priority) will take effect.

We now want to set the items and discount we are going to set with this rule.

Setting the rule conditions

If you are going to create a rule which requires 2 or more conditions (as we are doing here, the product must be made by Apple, be in the computers category and the price must be over £100) select ‘If All these Conditions are True’. If we wanted the discount to take effect if the product was a Apple product OR if the product was over £100 we would select ‘Any’.

Select the plus icon to start creating your condition and select the attribute you require, for this example we're giving discounts on Apple products so select manufacturer and then click on ... to select Apple from the list. Giving us this:

Our rule will now apply to all products whose manufacturer is Apple, but we want to further limit this to only products which cost £100 and over. Click the + icon to add a new condition and select Price from the list of attributes, click on 'is' and change it to equals or greater than from the dropdown. Then click on ... to enter the value 100, our second condition has now been added. We've also decided to only apply the discount to the category Computers so iPhones, iPods etc will be excluded. Click the + to add a new condition and select Category, click the ... and then next to the text input is a category icon which will display all the categories in the store. Select the category(s) required, in our case Computers.

The conditions are now set and we need to add the amount we are going to apply, we do this in the Actions section.

The Apply dropdown allows you to decide whether the discount is a percentage or a fixed amount, and whether the discount amount will be subtracted from the original price (By) or whether the discount amount will be the actual final price (To). For this case select select By Percentage of the original price and we then enter our value, 10. This will give a final price that is a 10% reduction of the original price. To select To Percentage of the original price would give a final price that is equal to 10% of the original price (a 90% reduction). The last thing to do is decide whether we want to stop other rules from taking effect on the products we have selected. In this case we will select Yes. Now, remember the priority we entered on the last page? This is what decides which rules are applied first.

In this case we entered the priority as 1. If we had another rule, £5 off all products, which had a priority of 2. If we had selected No on the Stop Further Rules Processing dropdown that £5 discount would take effect on the already 10% discounted price. Since we select yes the £5 discount will still apply to other products, but not Apple products equal or great than £100 in the Computers Category.

Now we select Save Rule and the rule is created, but before we can try it out we need to do some housekeeping. You may also notice that there is a Apply Rules button on the list of Catalog Price Rules. For the rule to change the price of the items selected you will either need to select Save Rule and Apply, or the Apply Rules button on the list of Catalog Price Rules. The reasoning behind this is that as you add new rules, the system must recalculate the prices and the priorities of the rules. If you have a Magento Store from Creative Hub the rules are applied each night automatically, but if you do want to immediately apply a new rule you must select one of the Apply buttons. Now the Apple Products equal or greater than £100, in the category Computers are discounted by 10%.