Shopware and promotions – higher quality marketing with Rule Builder

Promotions have been with us not since today. Seemingly trivial and well-established in customers’ minds, promotions play an important role in marketing strategy. After all, who among us doesn’t like to pay less?

Most, if not all e-commerce platforms, allow the creation of more or less complex promotions to encourage potential customers to choose our store. However, in this matter, Shopware 6 promotions stands out above the average, allowing us to easily create detailed customized discounts. 

Possibilities

With a few clicks, we can generate simple promotions, such as those based on discount codes or price reductions on a given assortment within a prescribed time frame. However, Shopware allows us to do much more. For example:

• BOGO (Buy one, get one free)
• Step discount (10% on first item, 20% on second. 30% on third, etc.)
• Discount for any X item from specified category (e.g. 20% for any third shirt)
• Discount for customer groups (e.g. a 10% discount for a loyal customer or discount for returning customer)
• Discount after exceeding a certain cart value

We can achieve this and much more with a built-in tool like Rule Builder.

Rule Builder is a powerful tool that allows us to condition many aspects of our store. In this case, it allows us to create conditions that must be met for a given promotion to be activated. Thanks to it, we can, for example, assign a promotion to a specific group of products or specify to whom it is directed. 

Case study

To give some idea of Shopware’s capabilities in this field, let’s study the case in which every fifth product in the shopping cart will be free.

First Steps

To create a new promotion, we need to go to the appropriate section in our admin panel. We will find it in the side menu under the name Promotions in the Marketing tab. After clicking the Add promotion button, we will see a window with basic settings. Here we can give a name, priority, specify the time frame in which the promotion is to be active or the maximum number of uses.

After saving our promotion, we gain access to more advanced features, divided into three tabs. In the “General” tab, we can change previously set values and specify whether the discount should activate based on a discount code.

Conditioning

In the next step, we move to the “Conditions” tab.

In the first section, we set the sales channel in which the promotion is to be active, and we can define whether we want it to combine with other promotions.

Next, we set the conditions that must be met for the promotion to be used when shopping.

Here the “Rule Builder” comes to our aid. We can give rules for the customer, the shopping cart, the products or the entire order. In our case, the promotion will be active for all customers but will be limited to a specific product category only.

However, before we go on to create new rules, in this particular case we need to activate the “Promote sets of products” option which will allow us to define the products in the shopping cart accordingly. After activating this option, a new section will unfold where we need to make some new settings.

In the “Mode” field, we choose the mode between “Quantity” and “Amount”. Then, in the “Value” field, we specify the value at which the promotion will be activated. In this case, this will be 5 products in the shopping cart.

In the next step, we specify the sorting method. By default, we leave “Price, ascending” thanks to which the price of the cheapest product in the cart will be reduced.

Setting rule for produtcs

After that, we can give a rule for our products. To do this, click on the “Product rules” field and select the appropriate item from the list. If we have not created a corresponding rule before, we can do it from here by selecting “Create new rule”.

We will be presented with a new window where we can define a new rule for use throughout the store. In this case, we want to limit the use of promotions to one product category. After assigning a mandatory name and priority and an optional description, we can start creating our rule. To do this, we select the “Search conditions…” field and from the list, we select the condition we are interested in.

After selecting the condition, we select the corresponding selector in the next field.

Then we select the appropriate operator.

After which, we specify to which product category our rule applies.

After saving the settings, the rule is ready to use.

Setting discount

At this stage, we have finished conditioning our promotion and can move on to the next step, where we will determine the discount amount.

To do this, go to the “Discounts” tab and add a new discount by clicking the “Add discount” button. You will see a new section for conditioning our discount.

In the first field “Apply to: *” we can specify whether the discount should apply to the shopping cart, shipping costs, or the entire order. However, thanks to the fact that in the previous steps, we activated the “Promote sets of products” option, we get a new option in the form of “Set group-1”. This is the one that interests us.

Next, in order for the promotion to be calculated correctly, we must enable the “Apply to a specific range of products only” option. We will get several new settings to set.

In the “Apply to” field specify which product in the shopping cart we want the discount to be applied to. If we select the “1st item” from the list and set the sorting to ascending, the discount will be applied to the cheapest product in the cart.

In this section, we also specify the maximum number of uses per order. If we do not set a limit, the discount will be applied to every fifth item. Finally, we set the discount type to percentages and set the value to 100.

And that’s it, after saving the entered settings, our promotion is ready to use. To complete the process, simply activate it in the “General” tab.

Summary

The discussed case briefly describes the most important steps to create a functional promotion on the Shopware platform. With the built-in Rule Builder, we can create much more complex scenarios, tailored to our individual needs. We are limited only by our imagination.