Magento Promotions 1: Price rules in catalog and shopping cart

Promotions are one of the most interesting features of Magento, because through them, you can entice the customer to buy.

Magento allows you to manage different types of promotions that are based on creating catalog pricing rules and shopping cart pricing rules.

Catalog pricing rules are those promotions that are applied when the product is not yet in the shopping cart (this is the case, for example, with sale items or specific seasonal promotions).

Cart pricing rules, on the other hand, are applied when the product is in the cart (for example: a 10% discount on the 'purchase of 2 pieces of an item).

Let's look at them together in detail.

Create the pricing rules for the catalog

As we anticipated earlier, promotions related to the rules for the catalog, concern offers that are made to products in the catalog.

To create this type of rules, you will need to access the Magento Admin panel and follow the path Promotions -> Catalog Price Rules.

At this point the following screen will open, with all the promotions already created. To make a new one, simply click on the "Add New Rule" button at the top right.

The following screen will then open:

This section has three distinct parts: Rule Information, Conditions, and Actions.

Information Rule

In this section, as you can see from the previous image, you will have to enter all the general information about the rule and then:

Name: you will need to enter the name of the rule.
Descriptions: if you want you can include a description that makes it clear how the promotion works.
Customer groups: here you can define the customer group for which the promotion will be active.
Status: in this section you will have to define whether the promotion is active or not.
From date...To date: Here you can choose the time period for which the promotion will be valid.
Priority: this section is very important when setting up multiple promotional rules, because by introducing a number, we can prioritize one promotion over another. For example: by giving as priority value 1, we will give that promotion the highest priority.

Conditions

In this section we must precisely set the conditions for which our promotion will be valid.

First we must choose how to apply the condition.

The voices ALL e REAL can be changed by clicking on them. Instead, we can choose to insert the entries "AT LEAST ONE OF" e "FALSE", according to our needs. The subsequent conditions that we will create by clicking on the will be chosen according to the initial premise made.

Indeed, by pressing on , a drop-down menu will appear allowing you to select the condition to be added, selecting whether to combine conditions or set them using some specially configured attributes.

Suppose we want to give a 20% discount on some product categories, for example, for categories with IDs 32,33 and 34.

We set as follows:

What we therefore communicate to the system is: if you find products in categories 32,33 and 34, apply the promotion.

We can also choose multiple conditions to combine together, such as, discounting all products belonging to categories 32,33,34, which are Yellow in color.

Now, however, we need to set the type of promotion to be applied!

Actions

This section is then used to apply the promotion to the products in the catalog. This is characterized by:

Apply: in this item we can choose the type of discount to apply (whether percentage, fixed amount etc).
Discount amount: here instead we need to enter the value of the discount.
Enable discount for by-products: if "yes" is chosen, it means that the discount will also apply to simple products constituting complex products (bundled, grouped, configurable).
Stop further rule processing: this item is related to rule priority, if set to "yes", this rule will take precedence over any others that may apply on the same products.

We are always in the case of wanting to apply a 20% discount on specific products in the catalog. To do this, we set up as follows.

Now the rule is ready to be applied!

Create pricing rules for the shopping cart

The pricing rules for the cart are very similar to the pricing rules for the catalog, the 'only difference is that this type of Magento promotions are applied to products in the cart.

To create promotions of this type you will need to follow the path: Promotions -> Cart Price Rules and click on Add New Promotion.

As you can see, the screen that appears is very similar to what we had in the Price Rules section for the catalog, but with some differences. First, you can see that the section is now divided into 4 parts (instead of 3 as it was for the catalog rules): Rule Information, Conditions, Actions, Labels.