Coupon Best Practices
Consider these best practices when using coupons.
Messaging in the Shopping Cart
Many different messages appear in response to a customer's input of a coupon code. These might need to be modified or translated. Examples include:
- Coupon code <name> is already in your cart.
- Coupon code <name> can't be combined with other coupon code in your cart.
Education/Documentation
The developer must provide the marketing/merchandising team with a clear understanding of how coupons have been implemented within their storefront.
Testing Coupons in Promotions
- Coupons should be tested by both the creator and requester.
- Coupons should be tested as soon as they go live into production.
- Customers should maintain a main list of coupon assignments.
Implement and Document the Coupon Workflow
Develop a workflow for the definition, review and creation of coupons:
- Identify clear roles and responsibilities related to online coupons within your organization
- How are requests for additional coupons made?
- Who is creating coupons?
- Who is managing coupons once they go live?
- What signatures are required, at which steps?
- What are the specific time-lines and deadlines?
Incremental Imports of Multi-Code Coupons
Salesforce B2C Commerce supports incremental updates to the set of existing (fixed, multi-code) coupons. This functionality is useful in cases where coupon codes are provided in chunks by external systems and need to be imported into B2C Commerce, for example, 1000 new codes per month.
Staging
A B2C Commerce best practice is to import coupons and their codes into a Staging instance and then replicate them. Merchants should refrain from importing and creating coupons directly into a Production instance.
Administrative Best Practices
For increased security, limit who can edit coupons and view coupon codes. Use coupon masking and grant read-only permission for the coupon module to all roles except those that need to access coupons. Coupon masking hides the coupon codes in the coupon module and can be turned on by enabling the View_Coupon_Codes functional permission.