Product settings: discounts and commissions

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

Product settings decide, for a whole slice of your catalogue, whether things may be discounted and whether they earn commission. It is a small module that prevents a large class of expensive mistake.

Rules by category, not by product

A product setting is attached to a point in your taxonomy — a parent category, a category or a subcategory — and carries three rules:

Discount eligible — may anything here be discounted at all?

Max discount pct — if it may, how far can anyone go?

Commission eligible — do sales here earn commission?

Because it is set at the category level, one record covers everything beneath it. You are describing your commercial policy once instead of ticking a box on nine hundred products and missing forty.

Why the ceiling matters more than the switch

Discount-eligible is the obvious field. Max discount is the one that saves money.

Some of your range carries margin that survives a generous discount. Some of it does not, and the person offering the discount is often not the person who knows which is which — they are with a customer, under pressure, wanting to close.

   Accessories     discountable, up to 25%
   Phones          discountable, up to 5%
   Prepaid airtime not discountable

Set once, that policy holds whoever is serving, on whichever day, without anybody having to remember margins per line.

Commissions

Commission eligible marks a slice of the catalogue as earning commission when sold. It pairs with the commission rules you will meet in the offers lesson, where an offer category can define who earns and how much.

The distinction to hold on to: product settings say what is eligible; the offer says who earns on this particular deal.

Set it early

Like taxes and currencies, this is cheapest before the catalogue is large. Retrofitting a discount policy onto an established range means auditing what has already been sold at what discount, which is a much worse afternoon than deciding the policy now.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, create a product setting for one category with a low maximum discount, then try to exceed it. Feeling the rule stop you is more instructive than reading about it.