What Are Discount Awards?

For the latest version of Commerce Server 2007 Help, see the Microsoft Web site.

The discount Receive (award) identifies what the discount applies to. The award types are any product, a discount specific expression, order subtotal, product/category, global expression, and shipping cost.

• Any Product. Applies the discount award to any product in the basket.

• Discount Specific Expression. Applies the discount award to products that meet the expression conditions. The expression you provide must be a catalog expression. A product that meets the catalog expression will have the discount applied to it.

• Order Subtotal. Applies discounts to the order subtotal. An order subtotal discount is an order-level discount that applies to all products in a shopping basket. Order-level discounts delivered with Commerce Server are a percentage or currency amount off the total price. You cannot apply the award of an order-level discount multiple times. Order-level discounts have an explicit limit of 1.

  To handle refunds correctly, you should distribute order-level discounts across all line items. Commerce Server distributes percentage off discounts and monetary amount off discounts.

• Product/Category. Applies the discount award only to a specific product or category.

• Global Expression. Applies the discount award only if the expression evaluates to "True". The expression is based on the product catalog. The discount catalog expression is evaluated against each item in the user basket. The expression must evaluate to "True" at least one time for the discount to apply. Global expressions are treated identically to discount-specific expressions. The only difference is that global expressions can be shared among multiple discounts. The following table is an example of a global expression.

  Buy (product)	Receive (award)	Offer
  Buy one pair of jeans	Get one Turtleneck T-shirt	At 50 percent off
  Buy an order over $500.00	Get Any pant in the Blue Jean category	Free
  Buy one Camcorder model 123	Get one Memory card OR One Camcorder stand	40 percent off

• Shipping Cost. Applies shipping as a discount award to all products ordered. Shipping discounts apply to an order at the cumulative level, as apposed to an item-specific level. This makes them similar to an order-level discount. You can create shipping discounts with monetary amount or percentage off amounts. A site developer must make custom changes to your site for percentage off and monetary amount off variations of the shipping discount.

Get defines the award value. The award values are percent off discounts and monetary amount off discounts.

There are multiple ways that you can award the discount to the user. Commerce Server supports three types of awards:

• Item-level discounts apply to specific products in the basket. You can apply multiple discounts to a single line item or to a single order.

• Order-level discounts apply to all products in a shopping basket.

• Shipping discounts apply to the shipping charges that users pay to have the items they order delivered to their address.

Commerce Server supports multiple ship-to addresses. For example, a user can buy many items and have them shipped to multiple addresses.

The following example explains how interaction policies of the shipping discount and the order-level discount are linked to each other.

The following is in the user basket:

Discount 1 will apply first because it has a priority of 10. The shipping discount is a cumulative discount. Therefore, the shipping discount and the order-level discount are linked using Commerce Server common discount interaction policies. Therefore, Discount 1 blocks any additional awards, and Discount 2 will not be applied.

See Also

Other Resources

Managing Discounts