Advanced promotions for commercetools: discounts, coupons, and loyalty

Future-oriented enterprises know all too well that composable commerce is the future. Composable architecture allows businesses to connect best-of-breed platforms into a single powerful system built on top of microservices connected by a rich set of APIs. This approach helps companies choose the right technology and quickly capitalize on new commerce trends while saving time and money in the process. 

commercetools is an outstanding commerce platform built around MACH principles. And now, their advanced commerce functionalities can be extended with world-class promotional experiences provided by Voucherify Promotion Engine. Read on to learn how to integrate Voucherify with your commercetools store and what benefits it brings.

Why do you need Voucherify promotions in your commercetools store?

commercetools is a top headless commerce engine on the market, but due to the sheer number of features, not all of them may be advanced enough for your unique business needs. Thanks to the API-first approach, commercetools allows users to extend their native functionalities with external, specialized software providers to deliver the best results.

Here is a short overview of why you should extend your commercetools promotions with Voucherify:

• More scenarios available: commercetools built-in promotional scenarios are limited as commercetools does not support dynamic bundles, loyalty programs, referral campaigns, promotions stacking or customizable gift cards as Voucherify does.

• Personalization: commercetools has more limited options than Voucherify for advanced customer segmentation, targeting, or real-time personalization on top of custom business attributes.

• Promotion experience: commercetools does not offer an out-of-the-box way to display all available promotions to an individual customer.

• Compliance: Unlike Voucherify, commercetools updates the promotions only at the checkout stage, not straight in the cart, which can lead to compliance issues and poor customer experience.

• Rigid limits: commercetools cannot handle a large number of concurrent campaigns.

• IT reliance: commercetools promotion engine requires more involvement for the engineering teams as for instance, it doesn't allow for bulk promo codes generation out-of-the-box.

• Weak market isolation: commercetools keeps all campaigns within one promotion editor which may be cumbersome to work with if you have a multi-region or a multi-brand company with many local campaigns running.

• Search: The search feature for campaigns in commercetools may be hard to use. It's challenging to find region-, currency-, store-, or channel-specific campaigns as all campaigns are in the same editor, and there's no built-in filter for these categories.

• Management: commercetools has fixed access permissions for the entire project and doesn't allow setting permissions separately for different channels, stores, or countries.

The promotion module offered in the standard commercetools instance is a great starting point for any business, however, if you need more customization and control over your discount campaigns and promo codes, you need specialized software. With Voucherify, you get to run plenty of sales promotions unavailable in commercetools by default. These include:

• Dynamic discounts that change value based on order total and other attributes.
• Discounts only for the cheapest and most expensive items in the cart. 
• Multi-tiered double and single-sided referral campaigns. 
• Product and order-specific discounts. 
• BOGO and bundling deals. 
• Stacking discounts.
• Loyalty programs.
• Gift cards.

Another great benefit are visual charts displaying detailed information about who, when and how used your discount codes. See all information at a glance or track each activity related to the given promo campaign or voucher with technical logs. Better understand how a given promo campaign turned a profit and react quickly if anything goes south thanks to easy campaign management from the UI level – no need to engage the development team each time you need to modify or stop campaigns. 

How does the Voucherify and commercetools integration work?

Voucherify and commercetools integration is based on the API Extension functionality that allows you to extend the API with custom business logic. Here is how this process works at a glance:

1. At checkout, commercetools fetches Voucherify API to validate and redeem the promo code. 
2. Voucherify returns the result and applies the discount to the order (to the cart, items, or triggers another behavior based on the discount effect). 
3. Once the order is paid, the code is redeemed and commercetools order and customer data in synced with Voucherify. 

For enhanced security of your promo codes, Voucherify supports the session lock mechanism that temporarily locks the voucher usage after validation. If you register a session, Voucherify will block incoming validation and redemption requests until the session is released. Once redemption is successful the session is removed automatically. You can use this feature to prevent users from using the same code simultaneously (e.g., by placing the same code at the checkout in multiple tabs).

Another interesting feature is the data sync between both platforms. The integration supports the synchronization of product, customer and order data, letting you run plenty of product-, order-, and segment-specific promo campaigns. 

Here is a diagram showing how Voucherify integrates with commercetools on a basic level (skipping among others data sync, distribution mechanism, qualification API).

How to migrate commercetools promotions to Voucherify?

If you rely on promotions in commercetools and/or your checkout component is tightly coupled with promotions, it's advisable to gradually shift to Voucherify to minimize disruptions and risks, speeding up the time it takes to see value.

Learn more on how to perform the migration from commercetools promotions to Voucherify with minimal disruptions >