Inside Magento #8: Marketing Features
In many popular eCommerce solutions marketing features like coupons and tier pricing are expensive or difficult to integrate. Some Store Owners choose not to bother and miss out on valuable marketing features which can improve conversion rates. Magento is different. We believe that all store owners should have these features without costly integration struggles.
Magento includes a full set of marketing features out of the box. Varien's CTO Yoav Kutner says Magento's marketing tools are "second to none," but we'll let you decide. Included in the Beta 1 release are the following:
Tier Pricing: This feature rewards customers who purchase multiples of an item at a time. Buying one item might cost $10.25, while buying two or more will cost $9.25 each, three or more $8.25 each, etc. Store Owners set the prices and the limits, giving them complete control.
Coupons: We've also included a robust coupon tool, allowing Store Owners to create simple coupons for everything from rewarding long-time customers to promoting holiday specials.
Store Owners can define the following for a simple coupon:
- Start date / end date
- Discount % or $
- Free shipping
- Valid product list
- Valid category list
- Number of total uses
- Number of uses per customer
With these tools, Store Owners can execute promotions like special gifts for repeat customers or a weekly coupon restricted to the first 20 customers to use it.
To create more complex promotions Magento includes a Rule-Based Pricing System managed through its Catalog. There are two areas a Store Owner can apply rules to: The Shopping Cart and the Catalog.
The Shopping Cart Price Rules are applied on the shopping cart page and act as coupons. Rules can be highly specific here, unlike in the simple coupon. For example, a Store Owner can create a shopping cart rule that gives 10% off any Cook Book (a subcategory of books, in this example), and also gives 50% off one Boston Red Sox coffee mug. The Store Owner can then limit the time for this promotion to a date range of July 14th-August 27th. Now the Store Owner assigns it the code "summerbaseball," and any customer who uses this code when checking out with cook books and a Red Sox coffee mug will receive the discount.
Catalog Price Rules are the tools used for storewide or category-wide promotions. Each valid product will receive the discount with no need for coupon codes. For example, a Store Owner wants to have a month-long sale in July and create a catalog rule called "July Sale" setting the date range to July 1st - July 31st. During this time, all products by manufacturer HP get 10% off. Also, all products of the "type" computer get 15% off. Since the store contains computers manufactured by HP, this can create an overlap. So, when creating the price rule, the Store Owner can choose to give computers built by HP either 10% or 15% off (by deciding which condition has precedence). The Store Owner could even add a third condition to "July Sale" that computers built by HP are 25% off.
Both the The Shopping Cart and Catalog rules can be applied to specific customer groups, making marketing even more flexible for Store Owners.
We can't wait to see how you use Magento's marketing capabilities when August rolls around. Let us know what you think in the comments.
1Tyler Scity |posted July 19 2007
Absolutely great. I can already think of some creative ways to use the coupons. Great work!
2Fletsch |posted July 19 2007
I like!
3Joe |posted July 20 2007
Sounds great!
I’m impressed, seems you’ve thought of everything. I’ve built and worked with features like prepaid cards or coupons and I can say this is a really useful feature!
Thanks, Joe.
4Shimrod |posted July 20 2007
tier pricing is perfect !
It was so hard to create it in oscommerce that including it by default is just cool.
5Sebastian |posted July 20 2007
I dont know if its included, but what do you mean by “Number of total uses”
So you can say, 10 books have arrived, these books will go out for 10$ instead of 20 $ which is the normal price.
I think your system is just awesome. Release it!!!
6roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 20 2007
Sebastian - number of total uses is a restriction on a number of times the coupon can be used.
7Ian |posted July 20 2007
For clarification, are you saying that you can place different percentage rates for different items using a single code? That would be fantastic as we offer trade discounts at different rates on different products and at present we need to ask the customer to buy each group of the same item seperate!
8Andre Lang |posted July 20 2007
Wow amazing stuff guys…
Also, another feature i would love to see is affiliate stuff, will that be available?
9Jed |posted July 20 2007
amazing! this is brilliant
10Carlos |posted July 20 2007
Great features. How about promoting registration, for example, a coupon that can only be used by registered users?
Or one that is activated automatically for the customer once the person registers, and only available then for 1 use, for example next time the customer purchases something?
Thanks!!!
11Daryl |posted July 20 2007
Jeez im biting my nails here , Magento sounds too good to be true !! , cant wait for the first release.
12Joe |posted July 20 2007
How about viral marketing using the coupons?
You give a member a coupon code to give away to his friends, and if the friends become members as well, and they buy something, the original member gets some discounts.
Would that be implementable?
If not, guess it would be fairly easy to make an extension of the marketing module.
As you see, we can’t wait to try Magento out!
Thanks, Joe.
13Filipe Pereira |posted July 20 2007
I can´t wait to try your Magento. Am really hoping you all can make us forget all those bad experiences with current e-commerce opensource solutions. How can we ever thank you guys?
Filipe from Portugal!
14Usamah M. Ali |posted July 20 2007
Hello,
It’s just today that I’ve come across this revolutionary eCommerce software! Looks so promising indeed & obviously a lot of hard work is put into it.
I suppose - for sure - it would be a commercial software, however, I’m concerned about two things:
1) Will it be encoded by any means? Either totally or partially?
2) Will customers be able to install it on their machines or it will be only a hosted solution?
Thanks in advance.
15Danny Foo |posted July 20 2007
Very impressive indeed.
Me and my partner can’t wait to spread the Magento love in Malaysia.
16Allande |posted July 21 2007
I can’t wait to try Magento (end of month August) it’s long to wait… :o)
17roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 21 2007
Ian - Yes, this is on the roadmap. A single coupon code can be used to provide different discount amounts per item/category/brand (and in fact, any attribute).
Andre - Basic affiliate functionality is also on the roadmap.
Carlos - A coupon used by registered users only - YES and will be supported in beta1.
Joe - Great idea. We’ll definitely think about it - I like it.
Usamah - Magento is open source and is not encrypted or encoded in any way.You’ll be able to download and install it for your clients.
18Nathan |posted July 21 2007
There’s been a lot of talk about Magento as a “beta.” Can you post a list of issues that you think may be too pre-mature or in general cause problems for those of us looking to build a store on Magento come August?
I know this would help me decide on where to invest my resources in the next couple of months.
19roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 21 2007
Nathan - We do not know now what the list of issues may be. This is the whole point of the beta process. Once the community evaluates the product and provides feedback, we will post a page with known issues. As with any beta product, I would advise you not to use in a production environment right away.
20Ork |posted July 21 2007
Will the process of updating/fixing/patching be automated ?
or will it be manual ?
and will there be an open svn server ?
if i understand, we can’t expect anything that can be used in production before Q2 2008 according to roadmap…
i am certainly wrong but next releases could be called alpha release no ?
21roy from Los Angeles, CA|posted July 22 2007
Ork - great questions. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to them just yet. We will be working out many of the details over the next few weeks.
22Magento Marketing Features und Developer Meetup » Magento eCommerce - XTCommerce Blog |posted July 22 2007
[...] hat wieder einen kleinen Einblick in die Shopsoftwaäre gewährt, diesmal in den Marketingbereich. Nichts weltbewegendes, aber die Couponfuntkionen sind recht Umfangreich und es gibt eine [...]
23Magento für den deutschen Markt? |posted July 27 2007
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