Free Shipping Promotion

OVERVIEW

There are a seemingly infinite number of ways you can create promotions in Hotcakes Commerce to get just the right buying behavior on your store.  This article will cover just one of them, but should be a good basis to create other promotions as well. 

REQUIREMENTS

The following pre-requisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have a Hotcakes Commerce site ready
• Have an Administrator or Superuser account on the site
• Have a basic understanding of how a promotion can work in any context

GETTING STARTED

If you haven’t done so already, log in to your Hotcakes Commerce site using an Administrator or Superuser (also known as “host”) account.  Once you do, go to “Hotcakes Administration” in the control panel’s admin menu.  This will bring you to the Hotcakes Commerce store administration area.

You can create as many promotions as you would like, combine them, set them to be exclusive, enable them, and so much more.  The possibilities are really up to you and how you set up each promotion.  Also, you can change how a promotion works at any time.

CREATE A FREE SHIPPING PROMOTION

In order to create a promotion, you first will need to go to the promotions page.  This is found in the Marketing menu.

Once there, you will notice that there are not any promotions the first time you land on this page.  In order to create a new one you first should choose the type of promotion you want to have.  Select the one you want in the drop down list on the left side.  Notice that you have many promotion templates ready to use, or you can create a new one entirely. 

Choose the one that is labeled “Offer: Free Shipping” for right now.

Now click the Add New Promotion button to being editing the new promotion.  Since you chose a pre-existing offer template, it will fill out some of the fields and options for you.

This will bring you to an edit view.  Be sure to enable the promotion, name it like you want it to appear to customers and yourself, and set the date range you want to promote free shipping.  Do note that you can also choose whether promotions can be used together as well.

Now you can set the rules to be more specific around what you want to allow as a qualification to get free shipping in the Qualification section.  Choose the option for “When Order Total >=” and click the Create button. 

This will open a dialog that allows you to set the criteria for the qualification.  In this instance, we’ve decided to only apply this offer to orders that are $125 or higher.  Click Save Changes to save your criteria.

You can add or remove any other qualifications as well. 

Now you can decide how you want to act upon the qualifications in the Actions area.  Since we chose an existing template, you can see that we already are giving free shipping for this promotion.  If you want to make any changes, they are made the same way as with Qualifications.  You should note that you have several ways that you can choose from or pair together for this promotion.

Once you save your changes at the bottom of the edit promotion view, you will see your promotion listed in the main Promotions view.  If you don’t, it’s probably because the date range is expired or the promotion isn’t enabled. Check the Show Disabled Items on the left to display the disabled promotions and edit them.

That’s all there is to do it.  Now anyone in your organization can add a promotion to your store in just a few moments!