Discount codes and rules
Codes and conditions, with the awkward interactions decided in advance.
Discounting is easy to start and hard to control. The difficulty is never the first code; it is the fourth one interacting with the other three.
How it works
- Codes with conditions — minimum spend, specific products, date ranges.
- Pricing rules that apply without a code, for cases where asking the customer to type something is friction you do not need.
- Trade pricing is held as prices rather than discounts, so a retail promotion cannot stack on top of a negotiated wholesale rate.
Decide stacking before you launch
The expensive scenario is predictable: a customer combines a welcome code, a seasonal promotion and a quantity break, and buys at a price you would never have offered. It is not fraud — the rules permitted it.
Work out what may combine with what before the codes exist, not after somebody finds the combination and posts it.
What it does not do
It will not tell you whether a discount was profitable. That question needs the counterfactual — would they have bought anyway — and no discount engine knows.
Stop reconciling stock by hand
One catalogue, six channels, one stock figure that stays right.