PrestaShop sales and private sales
Manage the implementation of sales or promotional operations easily in Prestashop thanks to Merlin Backoffice ® Flex
Differences between sales and private sales - dates 2023.
The2023 summer sales will begin as early as Wednesday, June 28, 2023, at 8am and will run for 4 weeks. So, as I write these lines, you have 7 days left to set them up. Don't panic, you'll see how easy and quick it is with Merlin Backoffice Flex.
Many retailers anticipate this sales period, setting up private sales around two weeks before the sales and right up to the start of the sales.
To be "in compliance with legislation" private sales must be limited to a clearly defined audience, and most of the time this is customers who have already placed orders or registered or joined a loyalty program.
So it's already started, but it's not too late to launch private sales this week.
Sale setup with a crossed-out price set up on a product in a PrestaShop test shop
Setting up sales and private sales in PrestaShop.
Is there a right way? In PrestaShop, there are several ways to set up discounts, crossed-out prices promotional offers or sales. These include "shopping cart rules", also known as coupons, "catalog rules", specific prices or crossed-out prices, sliding-scale prices, discount rates by customer group and by category... It's not easy to find your way around. Not easy to find your way around.
I invite you to read or re-read this article on mass price management on PrestaShop which gives you the definition and main differences between all these methods.
For sales and private sales, the best approach is to use specific prices.
As a reminder, a specific price is a discount, in percentage or amount, applied to a specific product or declination, meeting certain optional criteria.
The possible optional criteria are:
-a start date and an end date.
-specific country.
-customer-specific.
-specific customer group.
-specific-currency.
For sales, we'll set up a specific price on each product on sale, often as a percentage, with the sale start and end dates as the only criteria.
We can also segment into sub-periods, to set up progressively increasing discount rates.
For private sales, we'll choose the same tool, with an additional criterion, the choice of a specific customer group, containing all former customers.
Or we can also segment by forming several distinct customer groups, according to the criteria of your choice (e.g. purchase volume, having purchased for less than x days, etc), each with a specific discount rate
Alternative method well suited to private sales: you can use basket rules. They don't create a crossed-out price, and you can't limit them to a group of customers, but they do generate a discount coupon (or code). All you have to do is communicate this code to your customers via a newsletter, and you're done.
How to set up specific prices in PrestaShop
PrestaShop has two major shortcomings when it comes to setting up specific prices:
1-You can only do it one product at a time
2-We can't modify a specific price once it's been entered, we can only delete it and redo it
Thankfully Merlin BackOffice Flex lets you create specific prices in batches on a selection of a large number of products. And it also lets you modify them, one by one or en masse, to replace discount rates or dates, for example.
I refer you to this tutorial from the Simplified management of specific prices in PrestaShop with Merlin BackOffice Flex
To wit: setting up a specific price with a discount will create a crossed-out price on the front office product page, but will not display the "On Sale" banner.
This is done in a second step, and again product by product if you're using PS's native back office, or much better in a single action using Merlin Backoffice Flex. See our other tutorial on setting up promo banners.