Promotions & Discounts

1. SIX PROMOTION TYPES

• Percent Off — a straight percentage discount on matched items or the order.
• Fixed Off — a flat dollar amount off.
• Buy-One-Get-One (BOGO) — buy N of item/category X, get M of item/ category Y at a set discount (including free).
• Tiered by Quantity — the discount gets better the more matching units are in the cart (e.g. 3+ units gets 10% off, 6+ gets 15% off).
• Tiered by Spend — same idea, but based on dollar subtotal of matching items instead of unit count.
• Free Shipping — waives the shipping cost, handled as its own distinct category from product/order discounts.

2. STACKING — SAFE BY DEFAULT

Every promotion has independent controls for whether it's allowed to combine with product discounts, order discounts, and shipping discounts. Two promotions only stack on the same sale if BOTH of them explicitly agree to it — promotion A must allow B's type, and B must allow A's type — if either one says no, the combination is blocked. By default, nothing stacks. This means you'll never end up with an accidental double-discount from two unrelated promotions quietly combining — stacking only ever happens when you've deliberately turned it on for that specific pair.

3. WHO A PROMOTION APPLIES TO

Every promotion can be targeted:

• All customers, or
• Only new customers (checked against real purchase history — no prior qualifying purchase means they're "new"), or
• Only members of a specific Customer Segment (see the Customer Segments guide), or
• Only customers at a specific Loyalty tier or higher. On top of eligibility, you can set both a per-customer usage limit ("once per customer") and a total redemption cap ("this promotion ends after 500 total uses") — independently, at the same time.

4. HOW A DISCOUNT ACTUALLY APPLIES AT CHECKOUT

1. As items are added to a cart (or a coupon code is typed), the applicable discount is calculated live and shown before the sale is finalized — a true preview, nothing is committed yet.
2. An invalid or expired coupon code returns a clear "invalid or expired" message rather than silently giving no discount, so staff and customers both know exactly what happened. Repeated failed code attempts are automatically rate-limited, protecting against someone trying to guess valid codes.
3. Every currently active promotion is checked against its eligibility rules and minimum-purchase requirements, and the system works out exactly which combination of promotions is allowed to stack on this specific cart, applying the best valid result. Discounts can never push a cart total below zero.
4. Only after the sale is actually finalized and saved does the system permanently record each promotion's usage — using a locking, race-safe check against usage limits at that exact moment, so two customers can't simultaneously "beat" a limited promotion's cap by checking out at the same instant. If a sale used multiple promotions together, each one's usage is recorded independently, so a rare conflict on one promotion doesn't block the others from being properly recorded.

5. HOW IT CONNECTS TO THE REST OF THE SYSTEM

• POS / Cash Register and Sales Orders — both read live from this same engine, so a promotion configured once behaves identically whether a customer buys in-store or through a formal sales order.
• Customer Segments & Loyalty — eligibility rules plug directly into the same segment and loyalty-tier data used elsewhere, no duplicate configuration.

6. WHY IT SCALES FROM SMB TO ENTERPRISE

Quick Reference

  Promotions ............................... Marketing > Promotions
  Apply a coupon at checkout ............... POS Terminal / Cash Sale > Promo
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