4. Promotions

Originally written by John Hardwick, last updated Oct 26, 2023, on the Swan Retail knowledge base (FRS).

Part of: Implementation Guide

A promotion is a collection of selling and cost prices which are effective within a specified date range. SwanFRS automatically switches on the most current promotion each night, ensuring the system is always showing the correct price at time of sale.

There are two forms of promotion

Baseline Promotion

There can only be one baseline promotion. This promotion acts as a backstop stopping, effectively stopping SwanFRS running out of prices (when in use).

The baseline promotion may be named as desired and has a start date but no end date.

When SwanFRS is search ng for a cost or selling price, if there are no active selling promotions for the product, it will pull the price from the baseline promotion.

It is recommended that whenever a new product is created, the baseline promotion is seeded with the cost and selling price of the item.

It is advisable to keep the baseline cost up to date, however best practice is to ensure there is never a situation where a product doesn’t have a current active selling promotion.

It is possible to solely operate on a baseline promotion, however when using this scenario it is not possible to future set price changes and therefore all price change have to be done just before they become active.

Selling promotion

A selling promotion can be in one of three states, Closed, Active or Future.

A selling promotion has a start date and an end date. i.e. a finite time period in which it will be active.

• If the current system date is earlier than the start date of the selling promotion, then the promotion is deemed to be a future promotion and is therefore amendable.

• If the current system date is later than the start date of the promotion but earlier than its close date, then the promotion is deemed to be active and SwanFRS would consider the promotion when searching for today’s prices.

• If the current system date is later than the end date of the selling promotion, it is deemed to be a closed promotion and therefore will be ignored by the sales engine.

It is possible to change the start and end dates of promotion dependent upon state.

Selling promotions can be location specific and do not need to hold prices for every product. A selling promotion need only contain prices for products that are ‘on sale’, for example, during that time period.

It is possible for promotions to co-exist or overlap, in these situations the newest (most recently created promotion) will be used in preference to promotions created before it. Therefore, the consideration should be given to how promotions are created and populated.

Full details of promotional activity within SwanFRS will be provided during training.