Today’s consumers expect meaningful promotions at the right place, at the right time. As a result, creating impactful promotions has become essential to retail success. In this installment of our beginner’s guide to digital capabilities, we explore popular promotion types, emerging trends, and how commercetools can help you craft offers that delight customers and drive growth.
Trends in promotions for brands and retailers
For brands and retailers, creating promotions has become a vital part of how they grow their business. As today’s consumers increasingly expect special offers, particularly surrounding key seasonal events, it’s never been more crucial for companies to entice shoppers with new, creative and engaging promotional elements.
Research shows that 93% of US consumers consider “discounts and offers” pivotal factors in purchasing. Plus, 80% of shoppers revealed that a discount coupon either made them purchase sooner than initially planned, bought from a brand they normally wouldn’t buy or purchased more than they would have otherwise. That means promotions not only fuel impulse purchases but also set the stage for loyalty and retention in the long run.
Indeed, retailers that leverage promotions strategically are achieving more than just an immediate boost in sales — they’re laying the groundwork for lasting customer relationships that drive sustained growth. By aligning promotions with customer preferences, such as offering personalized discounts, tailored pricing or rewarding repeat purchases through loyalty programs, businesses can create a sense of value that resonates long after the transaction.
First things first:11 types of promotions and discounts
There’s a world of promotions and discounts that brands and retailers can leverage nowadays. Here’s a comprehensive list of options:
Discount-based promotions: Create straightforward offers, like percentage discounts (e.g., 20% off), fixed-amount discounts (e.g., $10 off) or bulk purchase incentives. These are the bread-and-butter of retail promotions, encouraging customers to buy more while feeling they’re getting added value.
Coupons and promo codes: Engage customers with easily shareable digital coupons or time-sensitive promo codes. Whether delivered online or in print, they’re a proven way to drive urgency.
Buy one, get one (BOGO) deals: Encourage higher cart values with offers like “buy one, get one free” or mix-and-match discounts where customers can bundle different items for a deal.
Shipping incentives: Combat cart abandonment with free or flat-rate shipping promotions. Shoppers are far more likely to complete a purchase when shipping fees are minimized or removed entirely.
Gift cards and freebies: Foster loyalty with gift card offers or surprise customers with gifts like a free sample with their purchase. These approaches not only incentivize buying but also create a memorable shopping experience.
Loyalty rewards: Incentivize repeat purchases with membership perks like birthday discounts or points-based rewards programs. These features deepen customer relationships over time.
Cart and checkout incentives: By offering threshold discounts for orders above a certain value, bundle deals (e.g., “Buy a laptop, get a carrying case 20% off”) and abandoned cart discounts, you can convert sales faster.
Gamified promotions: Interactive campaigns such as “spin-to-win” or sweepstakes add a layer of engagement. Such promotions can be integrated with loyalty programs.
Price matching and adjustments: The guarantee to match prices with competitors is a great way to build consumer trust. Post-purchase discounts encourage customers to return for future purchases.
Referral and social sharing incentives: Empower customers to bring in new business through referral bonuses and shareable discounts.
Pre-order and early access discounts: Reward loyal customers with exclusive early-bird pricing.
Seasonal and event-based offers: The importance of real-time
Whether your main seasonal focus is Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Back-to-School sales, Valentine’s Day, or any other event specific to your business, leveraging promotions and discounts associated with special times of the year is a fantastic way to gain brand awareness, increase sales and attract new customers.
However, this is only possible when you can apply your promotion or discount in real-time. With instant calculations and discount redemption running seamlessly, customers can use promotional offers at the moment they’re most likely to convert during seasonal traffic spikes — as well as unexpected sales surges.
Legacy homegrown commerce platforms often fail to deliver such time-critical shopping experiences. These systems are typically rigid and lack the flexibility to handle dynamic, real-time updates required for modern promotions. They often rely on batch processing or manual interventions, leading to delays in applying discounts or adjusting offers. Additionally, their monolithic architectures can struggle with scalability, causing slow performance during high-traffic events and, ultimately, jeopardizing sales and customer trust.
That said, modern platforms with composable principles are better equipped to help you run successful time-sensitive promotional strategies.
Leveraging promotions and discounts with a composable approach
Promotional capabilities are undoubtedly a cornerstone of retail success, but creating effective promotions and discounts is far from straightforward. It’s a complex process that requires careful planning, precise execution and the right technology to support it.
Brands and retailers need a robust, flexible promotional engine capable of managing intricate rules, handling large-scale operations and delivering lightning-fast calculations without compromising the customer experience. Enter commercetools.
Our powerful pricing and promotions capabilities enable organizations to define and manage unique revenue-generating strategies across stores, products, channels, regions, countries and more. This flexibility enables the configuration and combination of any idea for a promotion based on product, customer or cart properties. This enables you to create millions of combinations from basic to very complex campaigns in three ways:
Product discounts: Apply discounts to all products or predefined groups based on attributes, prices or categories even before they’re added to the cart. For example, take $5 off a single variant’s price.
Cart discounts: Any discounts with an absolute or relative value are supported, as well as special promotions such as gift line items, free shipping and multi-buy discounts. They affect the overall Cart value rather than individual Products. For example, you can apply a discount when a customer purchases multiple items of the same variant, and only then.
Discount codes: Customers can enter general discount codes or customer-specific discount codes during the checkout process to receive a discount. When they’re entered, they trigger a cart discount.
In addition, commercetools enables you to calculate a final discount in real-time at the cart stage, involving multiple layers of conditions (also known as predicates), such as combining percentage discounts, coupon codes and free shipping thresholds.
The following list provides a comprehensive (albeit not exhaustive) overview of the common discount use cases supported by commercetools:
Out-of-the-box (OOTB) product and cart discounts: Configure unique codes to be applied to a customer’s cart or subset of products, leveraging search, filters and sorting options to manage any number of discount codes. Group discounts together to be applied to specific channels, countries and customer groups. Control your discount codes by setting a maximum application of discount codes per customer or overall.
Product volume pricing: Reduced base price for an item when multiple quantities are purchased.
Time window discount: As the name suggests, a time-based discount.
Tiered percentage discount by spend: For example, 10% off the cart for customers who spend $30 or more.
Tiered fixed discount by spend: For example, $25 off the cart total for customers who spend more than $150.
Flexible discount rules: Implement discount rules including amount off, percentage discount off on the total order or a specific line item, fixed-price discounts, BOGO or multi-buy discounts.
Shipping discounts: Reduce cart abandonment with shipping discounts, such as free shipping, flat-rate shipping or a percentage discount on shipping fees.
Gift with purchase: Promote new products by identifying free items or gifts with a customer’s purchase.
Customer groups: Organize customers into groups, such as VIP customers, then offer special prices or discounts. Restrict product visibility to a customer group per regional or legal restrictions.
Our flexible pricing capabilities
Promotions and discounts add flexibility to your product pricing. Thanks to commercetools, the ability to create promotions and discounts reduces your effort in using and maintaining discounted and base prices as they can be deactivated when the promotion ends. At the same time, we support a wide range of pricing models that give you all the flexibility to support custom cases and dynamic pricing scenarios:
Moreover, the composable approach pioneered by commercetools ensures that your company also benefits from:
Extensibility: Go beyond OOTB features to create customized promotions that resonate with your customers. When supported with API extensions, commercetools Composable Commerce also offers further discounting needs (such as geofencing, bulk discount codes, stacked discounts and more).
Real-time data sync and high performance: Scale to keep up with sales urges at the speed of wow.
Localization: Adapt promotions to suit regional markets with our powerful internationalization capabilities.
Omnichannel shopping: Ensure a smooth experience where promotions work across online, in-store and mobile channels.
Personalization: Meet customer expectations through seamless integration and synchronization with real-time customer data.
Eager to dive deeper?
Empowered marketers: Managing promotions and discounts through a no-code tool
To easily create promotions, the Merchant Center, commercetools’ admin application that manages all things commerce, offers an easy-to-use visual editing configurator with templates that work for simple promotions or as a starter for more complex promotions. This no-code tool empowers marketing teams to create, manage and deploy campaigns swiftly, enabling faster time-to-market for promotions.
The predicate rule engine enables marketers to test and implement all promotions in the Merchant Center, and a discount code tool allows users to generate, import, export and manage single-use or multiple-use promotions. The user-friendly interface supports the creation and management of all these promotions and codes with rule builders and search capabilities. It can also define in which order discounts should be applied.
Making promotions, discounts and pricing even better
commercetools’ promotions engine continues to evolve thanks to incremental innovation delivered both in our powerful API library and Merchant Center. This reflects our commitment to supporting you to deliver even better experiences for your customers, while making the job of developers and marketers easier and faster. Find here some of our most recent enhancements:
Discount rules redesign: The discount configuration section for Product Discounts and Cart Discounts has been redesigned to improve the user experience when defining the logic for your discounts. Now, you can specify frequently used functions and predicates to speed up your workflow when building discount conditions using APIs and/or the Merchant Center.
Messages for changes on cart discounts: You can now subscribe to Messages that will be triggered whenever your key actions on cart discounts are performed, including creating and deleting a cart discount, as well as when using the Add Store, Remove Store and Set Stores actions on Cart Discounts.
Discount distribution models: You now have greater flexibility in how absolute discounts are applied to custom line items in a cart. Depending on your promotional strategy, discounts can be distributed evenly across all items or individually to specific items. Previously, discounts were limited to proportional distribution across all items.
Supported features in the Merchant Center: You can generate Discount Codes in bulk easily and without needing a separate tool. It’s also now possible to define keys for Discount Codes, ensuring a consistent experience when working with identifiers across different entity types in your composable commerce backend. Finally, exporting Discount Codes from the Merchant Center enables you to backup and archive Discount Codes, or migrate them to another Project.
Eager to dive deeper?
Get started with a composable promotions engine
commercetools’ ability to handle complex scenarios, such as personalized discounts or region-specific promotions, ensures that your brand can deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale, all the while empowering your developers and marketers to get the job done.
Brands like Cimpress, Christie Cookie Co., Emma, PLUS Supermarkets and Purple are some of our customers currently leveraging commercetools’ promotional capabilities to drive growth and loyalty. These companies showcase how effective promotion strategies can transform customer experiences and build long-term value.
With commercetools, businesses can create highly customized and dynamic promotional strategies that cater to specific customer needs, driving engagement and loyalty across channels.
Ready to unlock your promotional power in 2025? Get in touch with our experts.