Discounts

Discounts allow you to change the pricing of your products, both manually and automatically. You can select your own conditions to apply it by percentage, exact rate, rate discount, and free shipping.

Overview

Discounts are the perfect tool to ensure that your customers get the correct pricing when placing an order. You are able to enter discounts manually, as well as set up discounts that happen automatically. For automated discounts, you will be able to choose a type of discount (percentage, dollar amount, price override, or free shipping) and set the parameters for how and when discounts are applied and to whom.

This tool is powerful and can be used in many ways including; free shipping for orders over a certain weight, custom percentage discount for monthly sales, setting a percentage off regular wholesale price for certain customer groups, and more.

Manual Discounts (One-time Discounts)

Manual discounts can be created in the Order section, whether you are creating a new Order or editing an existing one, you will need to go over to the item line, add your desired discounted amount or percentage by adding the % symbol, and click on Update Order, this will automatically apply to the item you selected.

Important notes: Manual discounts can be fixed or percentage amounts on item lines.

Automatic Discounts

These types of discounts are the ones that you create ahead of time depending on what conditions you want them to apply, they can be for a certain amount of purchased products, selected products, seasonal products, etc.

You can even select it for special customers or groups of customers, whenever you or the customer create an order and they meet the requirements of the discount, they will automatically apply to the purchase order.

How to create an Automatic Discount

To create a new discount, go to Sales >Discounts:

Once in there, select the New Discount button:

In the discount creation section, you will find 4 steps to create a new discount:

1. Select your discount name
2. Choose if you want your discount to be a percentage, flat rate, exact rate, or free shipping.
3. Toggle on or off if you want the discount to be reflected on the purchase order or if you want it to be hidden.
4. Final step, select the condition to which the discount will be applied (bags, weight, customer group, etc.)

Once you have filled out the new discount information, hit the Create Discount button to enable it. You will find all of your created discounts in Sales > Discounts Here you can edit or disable each discount as needed.

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

Percentage Discount %

Percentage 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 on 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" if you don't want the discount to display on the invoice
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 multiplies this per unit price by the quantity desired.    

Dollar 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.

NOTE: This discounts per item on the invoice, it is not a discount off the total order.

Exact Price

The Exact Price option 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 backward 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, Sumatra will have the smallest discount at $.05 per bag, while 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 types 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: 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. 

Examples:

Both items in the cart for this customer have discounts that do NOT change the line item price therefore they can see the discount:

In the next image, the discount for the 5lb bag was updated to "change the line item price" and now you can see that the price is lower, but it doesn't look like a discount. The discounted price looks like it was a regular price.

This is the view for each type of discount on the Order in the App:

Conditions

You can target discounts on 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 who 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).

FAQ

• Can’t add a Free Shipping discount based on the money spent but rather based on weight.
• Can't be limited to specific customers - Discounts apply to any customers that meet the criteria, not selected individuals.
• No customer group-specific discounts - Discounts can't be restricted to a single customer group.
• You can't have a discount based on the quantity ordered, only based on weight.
• Configuring stacking discounts with conditions can be complex.