Introduction to automatic discounts

You can automate a lot of the common discounts that coffee roasters offer by using our discount engine, saving time and hassle as invoices are created right the first time.

Below, we tackle the types of possible discounts and the conditions that help you target your discounts to exact situations and customers.

Discount Types

% Discount

% Discount allows you to modify the base wholesale price for a product by a percentage.  As an example, you may want to offer a 5% discount to all orders:  

1. Choose % Discount from the list of discount types
2. Input "5" in the field provided (no % sign necessary)
3. [Optional] Add Conditions
4. [Optional] Check "Change line item price"
5. Click "Create Discount"

In this example, the percentage off is calculated per unit: $7.42 * (1-.05) = 7.04900 per unit.  RoasterTools rounds this to $7.05, and then multiples this per unit price by the quantity desired.    

$ Discount

% Discount allows you to modify the base price by a dollar value.  As an example, you may want to discount all coffees by $1:

1. Choose $ Discount from the list of discount types
2. Input "1" in the field provided (no $ sign necessary)
3. [Optional] Add Conditions
4. [Optional] Check "Change line item price"
5. Click "Create Discount"

In this example, all bags of coffee would be discounted by a $1.

Exact Price

Exact Price is for those situations where you only care what the final price that your customer will pay.  

It's especially useful when multiple products have unique base wholesale prices, but you want to discount to a common price.  Using Exact Price, RoasterTools will automatically calculate (and apply) discounts per item so that the customer pays the exact price you've set.  

Exact Price is especially useful for selling to grocery stores where you may want to hit a certain retail price, and will need to work backwards to arrive at a discounted wholesale price to enable that.

As an example, you may currently have three coffees that you sell in 12oz bags:

• Sumatra @ 8.45/each
• Guatemala @ 8.95/each
• Ethiopia @ 9.95/each

You'd like to discount all three bags to 8.40 so that a local grocery store can sell it at $12.00 with a 30%  margin.   In this example, the Sumatra will have the smallest discount at $.05 per bag, while the Ethiopia will have the largest at $1.45 per bag.  It's possible to set this up using $ Discount, but it would take 3 separate discounts to achieve the same result.  Exact Price saves a lot of hassle around managing these type of situations.

Steps to set up an Exact Price discount:

1. Choose "Exact Price" from the list of discount types
2. Input "8.40" in the field provided (no $ sign necessary)
3. [Optional] Add Conditions
4. [Optional] Check "Change line item price"
5. Click "Create Discount"

In this example, as outlined above, all coffee would be discounted to a net price of $8.40 no matter the base price.  

Free Shipping

Free Shipping is a common discount to incentivize hitting certain order thresholds or as a reward for select customers.

In order to set up a Free Shipping discount, the steps are:

1. Choose Free Shipping from the list of discount types
2. [Optional] Add Conditions
3. Click "Create Discount"

Change line item price

You can optionally hide a discount by checking off " Change line item price" with certain Discount Types.  This allows you to hide the discount to your customer, and make it appear that the net price including the discount is the normal price of the product.

This feature makes discounts act in a similar manner as a price level does on most accounting platforms.  It's a powerful feature that makes offering unique price tiers with percentage or dollar discounts easy to manage.  

🤔Please note that if two discounts can apply to the same item if a "Change line item price" discount is applicable, since the new price acts like a "Price Level" and is open to other discounts. 

Conditions

You can target discounts to certain orders by combining multiple conditions below.  It's really up to you, and how inventive you are with orders. 

Bags

You can limit the discount to one or more bags.  If you leave this field empty, your discount applies to all bags.

Minimum Order Weight

You can limit the discount to orders above a certain weight threshold.  This condition is often used when offering Free Shipping, as orders above a set threshold (e.g. 25 lbs) get free shipping.

In addition, if you limit the discount to certain bags, the minimum order weight used here will only apply to those bags listed above.  As an example, some roasters want to reward customers that order 5lb bags above a weight threshold.  However, they may not want to reward (or have a different reward) for customers 

Customer Groups

You can limit the discount to select customers by adding Customer Groups.

Products

You can limit the discount to one or more products.  

Product Groups

You can limit the discount to one or more product groups.  It is recommended that you use Product Groups over Products, since Product Groups are editable after a discount has been created.  

Start & End Date

Sales are also temporary discounts with a start and end date.  It's easy to offer a sale by limiting discounts with either just a start date, or just an end date, or a combination of the two.  This feature allows you to set up your sales ahead of time, so that you can plan your marketing accordingly (and rest assured that the discount will be applied in a few weeks).