Setting Up a Sale
Here are the steps and main considerations when creating a sale.
The Typical Flow
1. Create a new sale in the Site Manager.
2. Assign the sale to specific items or all the items in a category.
You can select a sale for an individual item:
Or, you can place an item on sale for an entire category by selecting "Place Items Under this Category on Sale..." from the I Want To... menu.
3. Publicize the sale through external channels (email newsletter, pay-per-click, etc.) or just indicate through verbiage and price display on the site which items are on sale.
4. Customers will place orders and either enter a coupon code or purchase sale items.
5. You can end your sale at any time - either manually by removing items from the sale or by setting a date range for your sale.
Creating a Sale
The Sale Manager allows you to set up sales on a per-item or per-category basis. Sales can either have a coupon code attached to them, which the user will need to enter during the checkout process, or they can apply automatically to the price of an item or group of items.
1. Click the Sale Link at the top of the Site Manager.
2. Fill out the fields on the entry screen. All fields are described in more detail below in the "Definition of Sale Manager Fields" section.
3. Consider some of the important options you have when setting up a sale.
When you set up a sale, there are some decisions you will want to make.
- Is this sale going to have a coupon?
If you enter a coupon code on the Sale entry screen, then a user will need to enter a coupon code in order to use this sale.
- Is this sale going to be store-wide or apply to individual items?
If you would like the sale to apply to everything on your site, you would select store-wide. If you are going to focus this sale on individual items or groups of items, you would select "No" next to "Store Wide:".
- Do you want the user to be able to use the coupon on multiple trips to your site or only once?
If you designate a single-use coupon then MightyMerchant will look at the buyer's ship-to address and only allow one order per address.
- Do you want the sale to Apply Once Only per order to the order total or do you want the discount to apply to each item that the user orders that is on sale?
This option requires a little additional explanation:
The impact of this choice depends on whether you specified a sale that is based on a dollar amount or a percentage.
If you chose a dollar discount, the choice of Apply Once Only will have a dramatic impact on the value of the sale.
If you choose a percent discount then there really will not be an impact on the order total if the Apply Once Only feature is checked.
Regardless of whether you have a percentage-off or dollar-off sale, there is always going to be one key impact of selecting "Apply Once Only": when this feature is set to "Yes" then sale will only be reflected on the total for the order. When "Apply Once Only" is set to "No" then the sale will be reflected on each line item of the order. If your intent is for the user to see the discount for each item then you want to set "Apply Once Only" to no.
There are other options to select. Most of them are pretty straight forward - like the start date and end date for your sale. We have included a description of all fields on the Sale Manager entry screen.
Utilizing Promotional Teaser Text and Image
Having a sale or coupon almost always involves some level of promotion
of that sale so your customers will know about it. Your promotional
efforts can take place on the site or off-site in the form of an
email-blast, print advertisement, or targeted communication with
customers.
There are many ways to utilize promotional and teaser text on a site. This is an area where you will want to have some discussion with the MightyMerchant technical team as to how you would like to utilize promotional text and images.
Typically, you will enter the text and image on the Sale entry screen.
The text and image will appear on the product page that is assigned to this sale.
You might also want to have sitewide text related to a sale or text on your home page.
Doing so can be accomplished using the MightyMerchant Messages feature and might require some adjustment of your templates.
Running Multiple Sales Concurrently
You can have many sales running concurrently. Here are a few things to keep in mind when doing so.
1. Having multiple sales or coupons with each geared toward specific products or groups of products is the intended use of this feature.
2. It would not make sense to have multiple sitewide sales running at once.
3. You can have multiple site-wide coupons going at the same time. The coupon code that the customer enters would trigger the appropriate sale.
