There are dozens ways to run promotion and discount campaigns for commerce and marketplaces. In this article, we will go through the type of promotion and discounts you can run, promotion and discount softwares and additionally Headless API first

We will go through

  1. Type of Promotions you can offer in Ecommerce, Examples
  2. Promotion and Discount Softwares
  3. Headless Promotion and Discount engines

Types of Promotion / Discounts

Fields Platform owner user storyEnd user user story
Percentage Discount 
condition
10%, 20%
– Name,
– Schedule 
– Value
– Maximum redemption limit (one time per day or one time per week, # of time all time)

Other conditions
– Minimum order value, – Maximum order value, 
– Minimum quantity,
– maximum quantity
– Discount value cannot exceed limit
– First time purchase or repeat purchase
– whether for the same product discount can be applied multiple times(on multiple purchases)

UX Level
– Show percentage of deal claimed i.e. the quantity remaining on which offer is applied.
– On the frontend a bar of remaining % will appear
– Discount offer clubbing allowed or not
– Allow platform owner to select whether current discount can be avail with any other discount
– Attach offer with payment gateway eg- 10% discount with Paypal


– Minimum cart value to avail offer
– Maximum discount that can be availed
– Attach offer with a Discount code i.e. Select whether user need to enter coupon or the offer will be directly applied to the product
 allow platform owners to add discount percentage End user able to apply discount on checkout page
End user able to view the details of a discount code when they click ‘i’

Show helping text along on the product page    “offer expiring in xyz hrs” or “Limited time deal” -both statement have different impact on user mindset






Fixed price Discount
200 off 1000
**all fields from above Allow platform owners to set a fixed Price off 
Get X Free product– **all fields from above
– Offer clubbing allowed or not(whether we can use other offers with this)
 Provide a product free on the shopping of other
Eg: Free product selection
– Allow platform owner to select the free product
Eg: Get oneplus bullet earphone on shopping of oneplus nord
 
Free Shipping Discount– **All fields from above
– Select locations from which free shipping in possible
   
Buy One Product ,Get other at X% Discount– **all fields from above
– Select other product that will be at discount
– Select the category – in this user will get discount for any item in the category
   
Bundle offers
– Sell clubbed products at lesser price than their arithmetic sum 
  Allow platform owners to select the items in a bundle


Headless API - Promotion and Discount Engines

If you want to have a best of category solution instead of a simple promotion engines, you can find the below players. And you can integrate their API with your solution. The only downside is the cost trade off with something which is already the best / developed / ready to used.

Traditional Promotion and Discount companies