Discounts allow you to offer customers incentives to purchase. WebSphere Commerce provides two complete and distinct discount infrastructures. The first discount type is schema-based discounts, which are discounts created and stored in the database schema. This type of discount is identical to the discounts found in prior versions of WebSphere Commerce. The second discount type is called rule-based discounts. This type, new in this release, allows for a more dynamic, and more complex discount system which is better suited to capture business processes.
Note that the two types are mutually exclusive, therefore you may only use one infrastructure, or the other.
Discounts are created using the Discount wizard in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. Once created, the discounts must be deployed to the production server. Schema-based discounts created using the Loader utility, or imported during migration from previous versions will function correctly, but may not display properly in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
Discounts have one of two states, namely active, or inactive. Discounts are set as active by default when created, but can be deactivated at any time using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. If you change a discount from active to inactive, you must propagate the discount to the production server for the change to take effect. For example, you might want to deactivate a discount before it expires if you notice that the inventory level for a discounted product is too low for the increased demand.
You can advertise discounts using the marketing tools in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. To do so, create ad copy which supports the discount, and select the ad copy when you are scheduling the advertisement to occupy a particular e-Marketing Spot.