Offers: packaging what you sell

You’ll need: Offers — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

An offer is a package: a named set of products, presented together, usually for a period, often at a price the products would not carry individually. A back-to-school bundle. A season menu. A starter kit.

What an offer holds

A name and a description, a generated sku, and photos.

Products is the set it contains. Discount percentage is a reduction across the offer. Start date and end date are the window it runs in — and like the featured dates in the website course, they are what stops last year’s promotion still being on your site in March.

Show on homepage promotes it to your front page. Allow customisation lets the customer adjust what they take rather than accepting the package as fixed.

Categories inside an offer

A simple offer is a flat list of products. A larger one can group its products into offer categories — sections defined inside the offer itself, each with a name per language.

This matters for anything with structure. A school list is not thirty loose items; it is Books, Uniform, Stationery. The categories exist for that one offer rather than in your global taxonomy, so an offer can be organised the way a customer reads it without you inventing shop categories that make no sense elsewhere.

Money rules per category

This is the part worth reading twice. Each offer category can carry its own money rules:

a discount that applies to every line in that category
whether its lines are commissionable
who earns commission on them, and what percentage

   OFFER: Back to school
     Books        discount 10%   commission: 5% to the school
     Uniform      discount  0%   commission: 5% to the school
     Stationery   discount 15%   no commission

One package, three different commercial arrangements inside it. That is very hard to express as a flat discount on a bundle, and it is exactly how school lists, supplier catalogues and partner packages actually work.

Set no participants on a category and it falls back to the order’s own arrangement, so you only specify what genuinely differs.

Order forms

An offer can point at an order form template, which attaches a labelled set of questions to the order — a pupil’s name and class, a delivery preference, a size. The answers travel with the order and appear on the printed document, so the warehouse and the customer see the same thing.

The next lesson covers building those forms.

Try it