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Creating Price Rules and Vouchers

Vouchers play an important role in your daily relationships with your customers. Typically, customers like two things when shopping:

Both can be achieved with personalized discounts, and this is precisely where vouchers come into play – or more precisely, price rules, which is a new feature in PrestaShop 1.5.

"Price rules" can take two forms:

Cart Rules

The "Cart rules" page gives you access to an advanced tool that succeeds and builds upon the voucher system from PrestaShop 1.4. Seasoned users of PrestaShop will not be surprised with the features that were added, but will have to adapt to the new name: when this guide mentions vouchers, we are actually talking about cart rules – which, in themselves, are quite different to credit slips.

A credit slip is first and foremost a written proof that a product has been returned. Most of the time, the user can use it as a voucher.

A voucher is a discount code which does not have to be tied to a merchandise return or a refund, and which can take many more forms than a simple credit slip:

  • A discount on an order (percentage).
  • A discount on an order (amount).
  • Free shipping.

You can apply a voucher to all customers, or a group of customers, or a single customer; you can set its expiration date.

A cart rule is basically an advanced version of a voucher: in addition to what a voucher could do in PrestaShop 1.4, the cart rules system introduced in PrestaShop 1.5 enables you to:

  • Name the discount.
  • Allow the customer to use only a portion of the discount.
  • Assign priorities between cart rules.
  • Set the compatibility between cart rules.
  • Have the discount only work with some carriers.
  • Have the discount only work with a selection of products and/or categories and/or manufacturers and/or suppliers and/or attributes... or all of these at the same time if necessary.
  • Have the discount be applicable for free shipping and/or a discount on an order and/or a free gift... or all of these at the same time if necessary!

In this user guide, "cart rule" and "voucher" are synonymous and interchangeable.

The "Cart rules" page lists the currently existing cart rules, which you can enable or disable by clicking on the icons in the "Status" column.

Creating a New Cart Rule

A voucher can be created automatically after a product return, but you can create a new voucher at any time manually, and be very specific about its properties.

The creation form has three tabs, enabling you to precisely build new rules and vouchers.

Information Tab

The first tab, "Information", contains the rule's identifiers and main settings.

Conditions Tab

The second tab, "Conditions", contains a large set of possibilities, enabling you to precisely target who should be able to benefit from this rule.

The check-boxes at the bottom of the section are very important, as they help you further filter to what or to whom the rule is to be applied.

The "Product selection" option brings a whole new form, and enables you to create not only per-product vouchers, by also per-categories, per-manufacturers, per-suppliers and even per-attribute. As a bonus, you can combine all these in order to specify your customer target as much as possible.

For instance, you can create automatic vouchers for your customer in the form "Buy at least 3 Apple product, get free shipping!"
This is really a tool within the cart rule too, and its configuration is quite specific. You can add as many product selections as needed, following this path:

  1. Click the "Product selection" link to add a new section.
  2. Indicate the number of products needed for the discount to activate.
  3. Add at least one rule, of the type you want: products, attributes, categories, manufacturers, suppliers. You can add as many rules per product selection as you want, even one for each type if necessary.
  4. Clicking the "OK" adds a new line in the selection. For each type, you must give details on the content the rule applies to. Click the "Choose" link and a window opens, listing the content available for this type (products, categories...). Move the content from the left panel to the right one by clicking on the "Add" button, and close the window by clicking on the "X" at the top right. If only one content is selected, the content field will give its name; otherwise, it will indicate the number of selected content.

You can add as many rules within a selection as necessary. These rules are cumulative: either they all apply, or the discount is not granted.

Product selections are independent: you can add as many as needed, and they will not influence each other. This enables you to create a whole range of products to which the cart rule will apply.

Actions Tab

The third and last tab, "Actions", is where you choose what the discount actually consists of.

Once everything has been saved, you can send your voucher code to your customers, or let the system handle the cart rules automatically, depending on your settings.

Your voucher will appear in the "Cart Rules" page, under the "Price rules" menu. You can delete or edit it at any time. If the voucher was set to a specific group or customer, then it will appear in the Front-Office, in the customer's "Vouchers" section of his account as well as in the cart (if you chose to), where they can choose which one to apply to their order.

Cart rules that are set to apply to all customers do not appear in the customer's "My vouchers" page: he or she has to know about them in order to use them. It is up to you to let them know about these public discounts.

In order to apply the cart rule, the customer needs to visit his cart and enter the voucher in the "Vouchers" field and click "Add". The customer will not be able to apply the voucher if the check-out is already validated.

Once applied, the cart summary displays the voucher's impact on the order's amount.

Catalog price rules

Catalog price rules are a new feature from PrestaShop 1.5, which enables you to assign price reductions by category, manufacturer, supplier, attribute or feature. As its name implies, this type of rules applies to a range of products; it cannot be used for a single product. If you need a discount applied to a single product, you must create a cart rule instead or create a specific price (in the "Price" page of the product's edition page).

For instance, you can set a rule that would say that for Spanish customers belonging to the "Good clients" group would get 10% off on your Electronics category and all Sony products for the first week of July.

The "Catalog price rules" page lists the currently existing rules, which you can edit or delete by clicking on the icons in the "Status" column. If you need to disable a rule, simply change its end date to the day before.

Creating a New Catalog Price Rule

The creation form page has two sections, enabling you to precisely build new rules.

Specific price rules

The first form is easy to understand.

This is where you set who should benefit from the rule, what the discount should be, and other details.

You can of course combine all of these rules.

Conditions

The "Conditions" section is where you set the products to which the category price rule applies.

Conditions are built around condition groups, meaning that your data from the "Specific price rule" section above can be applied to many different ranges of products.

The default condition group is empty. You can add conditions to it using the drop-down menus in the lower part of the section:

By default, new conditions are added to the condition group that was created last. If you need to add conditions to a previous group, click on that group to highlight it, and then add your conditions.

You cannot currently remove a condition from a condition group.

You cannot currently delete a condition group.

Marketing

New in v1.5.4.

This page gathers in one place some of the most marketing-wise important modules available in your installation of PrestaShop. It serves as a shortcut to certain categories of modules from the "Modules" page.

The modules in this page come from the "Advertising and Marketing" and "Smart Shopping" sections in the "Modules" page.

You can install modules directly from this page. When you click the "install" button (or select "Install" in the drop-down list and click "Validate"), the module is installed and you are taken to the "Modules" page, where you can open the module's configuration page by clicking on its "Configure" link. You can also return to the "Marketing" page in order to open the configuration page, or delete, disable, reset or uninstall the module, depending on its status.

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