Promotions, Coupons and Discounts
Automatic promotions and coupons are decided by the store's system, while the whole-sale discount, the staff rate, and charges are applied by the operator. This page covers each of them. What they have in common is that the store's system prices them all: the phone shows the result, it does not calculate it.
Automatic promotions
An automatic promotion is a price rule you configure in the back office and the store's system applies on its own. The operator does nothing. As the basket is built, the promotion applies, and the discounts screen shows what was applied and why.
The phone calls the same promotion engine that prices your counter registers, so a promotion behaves the same way on the floor as it does at a counter. The phone never works out a promotion price of its own.
The engine handles buy-X-get-Y, a percentage off, an amount off, a fixed price for a set (called a Bundle in iVendNext Desk), and sale-level promotions across the whole basket. Volume rules, date ranges, customer groups, and exclusions all apply as you configured them.
When a promotion has been earned but the reward is not yet in the basket, the phone offers it. Where the promotion is set up to add the reward for you, it is added automatically; otherwise the phone shows a short list to pick from. Declining leaves an ordinary sale. When a reward cannot be shown on the phone, the operator is told so rather than being left with silence.
Usage limits count across the phone and your registers together. When a promotion may be used once per customer, or a set number of times per store, a redemption on the phone counts against a register, and a redemption on a register counts against the phone. A held or parked sale keeps its claim while it exists, and releases it when the sale is cancelled or resumed.
When no promotion is active, none of this runs. A store with no promotions carries no cost for the capability.
As a working habit, check a promoted basket against what the promotion is meant to give before you rely on it, especially for a promotion that repeats within one sale, applies to part of a line, or is combined with a coupon.
For how promotions behave during an outage, see What Still Works and What Is Refused.
Coupons
A coupon is checked by the store's system. The phone shows two entry boxes, one for a coupon identifier and one for a voucher serial, with a camera on each so you can scan instead of typing. When both boxes carry a value, the serial is what is sent, and the store's system works the identifier out from it.
- A sale can carry more than one coupon. Each coupon is checked in turn against the basket as it stands. A line that one coupon has already discounted is closed to the next coupon.
- A coupon that has been used up never blocks the sale. The phone reports that the coupon is exhausted and the sale carries on.
- A coupon that applies to nothing is reported too. When a valid coupon finds no line it fits, the phone says so.
- When the coupon service cannot be reached, the sale carries on without the coupon rather than pricing something that was not checked.
Coupons are refused during an outage, because a coupon has to be validated by the store's system. Automatic promotions are different, and continue to apply offline from loaded data. See What Still Works and What Is Refused.
A discount on the whole sale
A whole-sale discount lowers the total of the whole sale, as a percentage or as a fixed amount. It behaves the same way your registers behave, and it is applied last, so a hand-entered whole-sale discount replaces a promotion's sale-level figure, exactly as it does at a counter.
How far an operator may discount a whole sale is a value on that operator's own record, the same as the markdown ceiling. When the discount goes beyond that value, the phone offers to send a request to a manager, and the manager approves it on their own phone. This works for both a percentage and an amount. See The Approval Ladder.
The staff rate
The staff rate is a discount for employees. It has its own permission, and it needs the employee's own customer record, flagged as staff, attached to the sale. For how to attach a customer, see Attaching a Customer.
- Some item groups can be excluded from the staff rate. The exclusion is a rule, not a suggestion. The operator is told which item was excluded and that the exclusion is fixed.
- A monthly allowance caps the benefit rather than blocking the sale. When you set an allowance and the employee reaches it, the staff rate stops for the rest of the basket and those lines stay at full price. The sale is never blocked.
- Usage is counted from completed sales in the calendar month. A parked staff sale consumes none of the allowance until it is completed.
- The staff rate never changes the price of a gift-card line.
When no staff rate is configured, the phone refuses a staff discount by name and points the operator to an administrator, rather than applying nothing quietly.
Charges
A charge is an amount the store adds to a sale, either carried from the item or added by the operator. Charges that an item carries appear on their own. An operator may add a charge to one line or to the whole sale, where you have configured charges.
- When charges are not configured, the phone shows no charge controls at all, rather than empty ones.
- A taxable charge carries its own tax and shows the tax-inclusive figure.
- Charges apply to in-store sales. On an order sourced from another store or a saved quotation, an operator-added charge is refused by name.
- Whether a charge comes back on a return depends on a refundable setting on the charge in the back office. An unrefundable charge is deliberately not returned, so the refund is legitimately smaller than the original sale. This is the most likely reason a refund looks short.