Custom discounts in Commerce Server !

Question

I have to create some custom promotion Discounts which does not fall in the category of DiscountTypes provided out of box from Commerce Server. Is there a way for creating your own Custom Discounts like custom Pipeline Components. Any ideas are helpful.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes.... You can create a custom pipeline component to override default pricing and discount business logic, you have just to pay attention where to add the custom component in the basket pipeline...

Answer 2

Yes, you can create custom promotion discounts, but there are several things to bear in mind.

The Commerce Server discount engine is (mostly) a closed box so you cannot extend it. You will likely want to create a new custom pipeline component (as Massimiliano Peluso mentions). This gives you two broad options. Either a) you replace the Commerce Server out of the box functionality entirely, or b) you will apply your discount engine pipeline component before or after the Commerce Server one has executed. This latter option brings up issues of the ordering of application of discounts, and how to apply interaction rules between Commerce Server discounts and your own.

Note that there are limited options for extending Marketing Manager, so adding new types of discounts there would be difficult. You will likely need to have a different data repository in which you store your new discounts and a new tool to manage them.

Answer 3

Actually in order to create a custom discount module and integrate it to the commerce server you don’t need to change the price of the product in the basket.

Think about as follows:

A discount is a way of payment, that was done on behalf of the customer. So if you create a payment method (for more info on creating a discount have a look at here) called “discount” and your discount engine can add the relevant “discount” to the order total as reduction of the payment. As commerce server supports multiple payments, this is only a matter of creating a new payment and testing it well for your needs.

Also have a look at Out Of the Box discount types and their explanations from this article.

Answer 4

Enticify is a commercial replacement for the Commerce Server discount engine. It offers a number of discount types that Commerce Server does not support, which may meet your needs. This includes bundle discounts, price point discounts (e.g. 3 for $20) and gift with purchase promotions. Enticify also has an extensibility model, so additional discounts and promotions can be supported.

The key differences are highlighted in Why Enticify for Commerce Server? and a matrix of the differences can be found in the Commerce Server vs. Enticify Feature Matrix.

Disclaimer: I am the Founder and CTO of Enticify. Enticify is a commercial product, but it is directly relevant to this question and is the only way to add "first-class" custom discounts to Commerce Server.