How to set up bulk pricing with shop offers

When churches buy in boxes rather than single copies, banded pricing is what makes it work: £4.00 a copy, £3.00 each for six or more, £2.00 each for a hundred. Shop offers handle all of that automatically at the checkout, once you’ve set them up carefully. This is the most involved job in the shop, so give it an unhurried few minutes.

Setting up banded offers

1. Decide your bands on paper first. For example: £4.00 for a single copy, £3.00 each for 6 to 25, £2.50 each for 26 to 99, £2.00 each for 100 to 499, and £1.50 each for 500 or more.
2. In the shop, open the item and go to its list of offers, then add a new offer. (Editing an existing one opens the same window.)
3. Give the offer a title with the item’s name in it, like “Luke’s Gospel £3.00 for 6 to 25 copies”. Shoppers can see the title alongside the offer, and when you come to put offers in order later, a screen full of offers named after their items is far easier to work with.
4. Write the description shoppers will see, e.g. “£3.00 per copy when you buy 6 to 25”.
5. Set the dates. For a standing offer, put the end date years ahead; you can type dates rather than clicking through the calendar. Offers vanish silently when they expire, which is a common cause of “the discount’s stopped working”.
6. Tick ‘Can’t be used in conjunction with other offers’ unless you genuinely want offers stacking on top of each other. Stacked offers are where checkout arguments come from.
7. Set the criteria: the customer must purchase between 6 and 25 of this specific item. Point it at the item itself, not a whole category, unless you really do want the offer running category-wide. For your top band, set the minimum only and leave the upper end unlimited.
8. Set the reward: the amount to take off each item, not the new price. A £4.00 book selling at £3.00 in this band means £1.00 off. Cap the reward at the top of the band (up to 25 items here), and tick the option to apply the discount to the items that met the criteria.
9. Save, then repeat for each band. The ranges must join up without overlapping: 6 to 25, then 26 to 99, then 100 to 499, then 500 and up. If 25 appears in two bands, the shop has to guess.
10. Finally, put the offers in order. Open any of them and use the ‘Set offer priority’ link. The dialog asks you to click the position in the list where the offer should go, so move the mouse to where you want it and click once; it isn’t drag and drop. The biggest discount belongs at the top, because the shop applies the first offer in the list that fits, and a small offer above a big one means big orders get the wrong price.

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Good to know

• Where an offer shows is decided by what it’s attached to, not by anything in its title or description. An item-scoped offer appears on that item’s page and the category page directly above it; a category-scoped offer appears on that category and the pages beneath it. For an offer to show on any other page, that page needs a Special Offers module on it.
• Keep offers simple. The system can handle wonderfully complicated combinations, but every extra layer is another thing to administer and another way for a customer to feel short-changed. A clean set of bands beats a clever tangle.
• An offer can cover a whole category instead of one item, and anything you add to that category later joins the offer automatically. Useful for a series where the discount applies across all the titles.
• Offers only ever discount the items themselves; delivery is always charged at your normal rates.
• To make an offer private to whoever holds a code, see how to create a voucher code for your shop. And if an offer misbehaves, why isn’t my shop offer working? walks the usual causes.