There is no denying that customers love getting discounts on purchases. With this in mind, we have implemented a feature that will allow administrators to set rules that will automatically give away discounts to the customer based on certain criteria matching.
 

What is a Cart Rule?

A Cart rule enables customers of your eCommerce site to have various discounts applied to their shopping cart based on the specific criteria that they fulfill. Each eCommerce site can have multiple cart rules setup for multiple purposes which are then ordered based on the administrators priority.

Each cart rule comprises of one or more condition lists which is then followed by one or more action list. To automate the application of these rules, they can be scheduled to make them active or inactive at specified times.

Following are the various modes/types of cart rules in Siteflex:

• Auto : Automatic rules are applied when the products in customers' cart match the condition specified in the rules' condition list. The actions specified for this rule are then automatically applied to the cart. There can be multiple actions for these type of rules.
   
• Manual : Manual rules are promocodes. These rules need to be manually entered into the cart by typing their promocodes. If the products in the customers' cart matches conditions specified in this rule, then only the rule is applied else not.
   
• Bundle : Bundle rule matches the products in the condition list and assigns them to a bundle and hence sets a fixed price for this bundle. It is a type of automatic rule.
   
• Contact : Rule of this type is used in performing different operations with the contact that has just purchased the cart. Some of these operations could be assigning contact to different categories or increasing the subscription date , etc.
  Note: These types of rules will only be applied when the transaction has been successfully finalized.

How to setup a Cart Rule?

'Manage Cart Rules' will be available under eCommerce module on the Siteflex admin control panel, if you have purchased this module with your Siteflex licence.

To help you get started, the cart rule screen is fairly descriptive with inline help items available for almost all of the individual fields.

Condition List : Multiple conditions can be attached to a single cart rule which then allows the administrator to setup a strict criteria for a discount. There could be various conditions depending on what product the customer is buying or which product categories are included or what the cart value is, etc. A rule will only be applied to a shopping cart when products in the shopping cart match the criteria specified in the condition list.

Action List : This section of cart rule allows the administrator to specify what sort of discount will be achieved by the shopping cart when the above specified condition match. The discounts can be specified in terms of percentage, dollar value or even a set price for a group of product (collectively called a bundle).

How to prioritise Cart Rules?

On the left navigation box, there is a link for 'Manage Priority'. Once you are on the manage priority screen, you can drag each of the individual rule to manage their priority. Note: Priorities for manual rule and automatic/bundle rule are separate.

Excited? Don't hesitate to talk to us further about how Cart Rules can best help you get the most out of your Siteflex eCommerce website.

Custom Segments are a great way of identifying areas of success in Google Analytics. Currently, to the ire of some, social media campaigns are increasing in popularity, seemingly by the day. But just how well are these social media campaigns translating into visitors for your website? Google Analytics provides an insight.

Victoria Hansen (Blackbook Cooking), social media extrodinaire and self-proclaimed foodie, put us onto a recent article from The Next Web which has a detailed walkthrough on setting up a targeted social media custom segment in Google Analytics.

It has shown some amazing results.
-Victoria Hansen

The basic gist of the article; create a "Social Media" custom segment, that looks at the visitor's traffic source and whether it contains facebook.com, twitter.com, youtube.com, along with any other social media domains that may be relevant for your organisation. With this particular slice of data you'll be able to quickly identify which of your social media campaigns have had more success than others.

More importantly, you can make informed decisions for future social media campaigns based on this Analytics data and what resonates with your audience, hopefully resulting in greater success!

There are plenty of other, more advanced custom segments you can play around with, but this is a great starting point for taking further advantage of some fantastic, insightful data in Google Analytics.

Check out How to track Social Media within Google Analytics on The Next Web.