For shops looking to reach their online audience with occasional promotions, Big Commerce’s Cart-Level Discounts provide a number of ways to customize your special offers. For example, you can reward your biggest spenders with a free add-on once they’re reached $200 or more in their cart, or you can offer free shipping once an order has reached $50. You can also determine the date range that your promotion is available, and even customize the banner text that pops up to either upsell or congratulate the customer (ex: “Congratulations!  Your order qualifies for 15% off.”)

Something to remember: as these offers are based on a visitor’s cart (hence the name “cart-level discounts”), they won’t show up on your product pages. They do, however, show up on your customer’s cart page, and you can advertise your promotions with supplemental banners or marketing campaigns (we recommend adding a phrase along the lines of: “discounts applied at checkout”).

Cart-Level Discount Examples

• Free Shipping Discounts

Order at least $250, qualify for free shipping

Order at least 5 Holiday Cards, get free shipping on your order

• Order Discounts

Get $15 discount on orders of $250 or more

Order at least $100, and get 50% off the least expensive item in the cart

Apply a tiered discount of 15% off orders of $100 or more, or 20% off orders $150 or more

• Category Discounts

Buy 5 shirts, get 1 shirt in the same category free (must be of equal or lesser value)

Get $10 or 10% off all items in one or more categories (can exclude certain subcategories)

• Customer Discounts

20% discount for repeat customers (i.e. customers with registered accounts)

10% discount for new customers

• Product Discounts

Buy one, get one free

Buy one, get another product free

Buy 5 gift baskets, get 2 greeting cards for $10

To create you Cart-Level Discounts, go to Marketing > Cart-Level Discounts on your BigCommerce dashboard. Click ‘Create Cart-Level Discount’ in the upper left-hand corner.’ Once your discounts have gone live, you can check out their performance, too. View the date range in which the discount is available, and see how many times the promotion was used. You can also easily check and uncheck the box next to your discount on the main display page to quickly enable or disable your rule.

Have fun, and get creative! Think about your unique customer base and the ways in which you can reach them with Cart-Level Discounts. Do you have lots of repeat customers? Consider rewarding them with 20% off their order in July. Want to push add-ons around the holidays? Set up a discount to offer 50% off chocolates when a customer orders from your holiday category. This powerful tool offers many truly effective possibilities, so experiment with which offers your customers are responding to, and start utilizing your online store’s Cart-Level Discounts to bring in more sales!