Multi-buy & Auto apply Discounts

These discounts allow you to set up special pricing when customers purchase specific quantities of sale items, price bands, or events. 

For example, you may wish to create a ‘Family Ticket’ which offers a discount of 10% off when a customer purchases 2 Adult tickets and 2 Child tickets, maybe a 5% discount for group purchases of 10 tickets in one order or maybe a discount when purchasing more than one event at the same time.

Creating Multi-Buy Discounts

1. Access the discount code creation page by selecting ‘Ecommerce’ and then ‘Basket codes’ from the admin menu.
   
   

2. Select the ‘Add new discount code’ button
   
   

3. Enter the name of the discount code, remembering that this code must be numbers and/or letters, no spaces.
   
   

4. Select the ‘Multi-buy’ option
   
   

5. Determine the quantities of each item for the discount. For example, if you wanted to offer a discount for customers purchasing the ‘Family Ticket’ then select the quantity of 2 for each of the Adult & Child ticket types.
   
   

6. You can choose the sale items, price bands, or events that the discount applies to.
   
   

7. Decide on the discount value or percentage. In the example provided, a 10% discount is applied when the specified combination of tickets is purchased.
   
   

8. Once the discount is created, you can impose various restrictions. These can include limitations like "once per order" or "once per customer." 

This method still relies on the customer typing in the code when sale items are in the basket in order for the discount to be activated.

Auto Apply Discounts 

These offer a convenient way to automatically apply discounts when certain conditions are met. Customers no longer need to input a discount code during the checkout process to receive the discount.

Discounts are created in the same way but with the extra addition that once the discount is created, the ‘Auto-apply’ option must be activated. Within discount codes you can specify a maximum of 10 discounts that are capable of being auto-applied. The auto-apply option can be found on the discount Edit form, as shown below.

This additional step is to ensure that discounts are not automatically activated and available on all customer baskets before the discount is set up and restrictions are added. 

For example, if you created a 50% discount without specifying the applicable sale items, this discount could be applied across the board to all current and future customer baskets. A warning message, as shown below, will appear once this option has been enabled.

Once the auto-apply option is activated, the submit button must be pressed in order to save the change to the discount. It's important to note that ‘child discount codes’ and ‘share via URL’ are not available options for auto-applied discounts.

Finally, if multiple auto-applying discounts are in use, you must also select the order in which these will be attempted. This option can be found in the drop-down next to “Create Discount Code”.

As an example if you have the following discounts: 

• “10% discount when you buy 2x of item X” 
• “15% discount when you buy 4x of item X”

You would need to order them such that the 15% discount is first as shown in the screenshot above. Otherwise, even if the customer adds 4 items to the basket, the 10% discount would be applied to their basket before the 15% discount is checked.