In the first and second part of our competitive pricing product updates series, Jordan and I introduced new and enhanced discount rules and scheduling features on our platform. Today, we’re excited to announce additional discount rules to help Bigcommerce clients with their overall pricing strategy, especially as the 2015 holiday season approaches.
As we collected feedback from our clients concerning their needs around running discount campaigns, the necessity of additional rules such as tiered-based and brand-based discounts became apparent.
We’ll provide the tools to offer your best price in a way that enables you to scale your business.
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We also heard from our clients that there was an immediate need to enhance our existing free shipping discount rules. Free shipping is a marketing tactic once heralded by Amazon Prime — though in order to compete with bigger box retailers, SMBs are having to squeeze their margins and take on the shipping costs themselves. We don’t want to stand in the way of your marketing strategy; we want to make sure Bigcommerce provides all the tools necessary for you to offer your best price, including free shipping if applicable, in a way that enables you to scale your business.
In the past, our free shipping rules limited clients due to the fact that the rules were all-encompassing. This forced online stores to absorb the cost of expensive shipping to international customers, given that our backend didn’t differentiate discounts for individual geographies. Our enhanced zone-based free shipping rules help alleviate this issue immediately.
Throughout September and October, we’ll gradually roll out these enhancements to the entire customer base. Here is what you can expect.
Zone-based Free Shipping Discount Rules
Currently we offer two existing free shipping discount rules, including:
- Rules on orders of at least a certain value
- Rules on orders that have at least a certain number of a specific product (i.e. discounts trigger for consumers when they place 2 or more of product X)
These existing free shipping discounts are applied to all shipping zones configured in the store. This means that Bigcommerce clients can now provide free-shipping worldwide and bear shipping costs for zones they couldn’t afford to ship for free. In other words, free shipping would be activated no matter the physical location of the shopper.
We’ve learned, however, from conversations with our clients, that this system was highly problematic given that long-haul shipments (e.g. from California to Australia) cost more to ship and thus eat away at our clients’ margins. This experience or strategy is unacceptable, which why we are now introducing introduced zone-based conditions to the existing free shipping discount rules.
You will soon have an option to select zones to apply a discount rule or limit free shipping.
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We will be enhancing these two rules such that you can restrict them to apply to specific shipping zones. While creating or editing a free shipping discount rule, you will soon have an option to select from a list of zones that you can create in the Shipping Manager (Settings > Shipping). From this list, you can select one or multiple zones to apply to the discount rule and limit free shipping to the selected zone(s) only.
Bulk/Tiered Discount Rules
In addition to enhancing the free shipping rules, we will also be introducing tier-based rules to run bulk discounts. This has been a frequent request from our clients and for their benefit we have identified two tier-based options which will be categorized under a new rule type: bulk/tiered discount.
Order at least $X, get $Y (or %Y) off
You can use this rule and set tiered values for X and Y. For instance:

Buy X products from specific categories and get $Y (or %Y) off those products
You can specify one or multiple categories on which you want to apply this rule and set tiered values for X and Y. For instance:

Brand Discount Rules
We also heard requirements from clients who are in the reseller business (they stock and sell products from other brands/labels within their store). They wanted to be able to run discounts on the different brands they stock. As such, we will be introducing a new rule type — brand discount — under which you will find the new brand-based discount rule.
Using this, our clients can run discounts such as:
- Apply $ discount on each item in Brand X
- Apply % discount on each item in Brand Y
In all, we’re working hard to address the needs of the Bigcommerce customer base to help amplify their 2015 holiday season success. By code freeze, we will have pushed the following updates to our marketing discount module:
- Redesigned and simplified the marketing discounts UI
- Extended functionality for two discount rules:
- Order discount: Apply a $ or % discount on orders of $X or more
- Category discount: Get $ or % off each item in one or more categories
- Added new scheduling functionality:
- Introduced start date field
- Introduced start time & end time fields (for flash sales)
- Added shipping zone restrictions to existing free shipping discount rules:
- Buy X items of product Y, get free shipping (to specific shipping zones) on the order
- Order at least $X, get free shipping (to specific shipping zones) on the order
- Added four new discount rules:
- Order discount: Order at least $X, get one unit of Product Y for $ or % off
- Brands discount: Apply a $ or % discount on each item in one or more brands
- Tiered discount: Apply a tiered discount off the total order, based on the order value
- Tiered discount: Apply a tiered discount based on the quantity of items ordered within a specific category
Have any questions or concerns about these updates? Leave us a comment and we’ll get back to you. Happy selling!
The post Competitive Pricing Products Updates Part 3: Zone-based Shipping, Tiered and Brand Discount Rules appeared first on The Bigcommerce Blog.