Bulk BOGO promotions for BigCommerce
Staff set up a campaign once, and the tool creates or updates every BigCommerce promotion it needs. Sometimes that is hundreds.
8,207
promotions nobody built by hand, in about five months
410 to 685
estimated hours of hand entry saved
997
promotions created on the busiest day
The problem
BigCommerce promotion rules cannot express some common offers across a whole brand. To run buy one get one free on every product in a brand, this multi-brand retailer needed a separate promotion for each product.
A team member built these by hand in the BigCommerce admin, one at a time. On some days that meant close to a hundred promotions.
After that, the same deal had to be set up again for ads and for the storefront. Promotions were tracked in a shared spreadsheet, and promotions that had ended kept showing as active.
What we built
- A promotion builder with the same two parts as the BigCommerce editor: the condition ("if the customer...") and the reward ("then reward..."). It covers spend thresholds, buy quantities, free products, free shipping, product discounts and order discounts.
- Targeting by product, variant, category, brand, custom field or option, with a warning before "All products" is used.
- One click creates or updates every promotion a campaign needs, for example one per product for a brand-wide BOGO.
- Start and end times in the store’s time zone. Changing a campaign’s dates updates every linked promotion.
- A draft preview before publishing, and clear error screens when BigCommerce rejects something.
- Stock-aware promotions. When a product in a campaign sells out, its promotion is switched off. When it comes back, the promotion is switched on again.
- A paid ads guard. The "promote with paid ads" flag turns off when stock falls below a set level, with the reason recorded.
- Spend caps. When a promotion reaches its cap, it is turned off in BigCommerce and staff are told.
How it works
- Staff fill in one friendly form. The tool turns it into BigCommerce’s rule format, checks every product ID, and writes the promotions through the BigCommerce Promotions API.
- One campaign can fan out into hundreds of promotions. Updates run side by side with retries, and saves show their progress.
- BigCommerce does not send reliable notices when a promotion changes. So every 15 minutes the tool copies the state of every promotion back from BigCommerce, including ones made by hand, and switches campaigns to inactive when their promotions end.
- Stock changes from BigCommerce trigger the restock and paid ads checks. An hourly sweep rechecks everything in case a change was missed.
- An email alert goes out when a sync run fails.
Results
Measured over about five months of use:
- 8,660 promotions created in BigCommerce through the tool.
- 8,207 of those are promotions a person would otherwise have built by hand. This is the conservative count: each campaign and product pair is counted once.
- An estimated 410 to 685 hours of hand entry saved, based on our estimate of 3 to 5 minutes for one hand-built promotion. That averages about 19 to 31 hours a week.
- The busiest day was 997 promotions. By hand, that would have taken about 50 to 83 hours.
- 14 campaigns have 100 or more linked promotions. The largest has 350.
- The restock automation switched promotions back on 1,488 times and added products back 529 times.
- Paid ads were turned off automatically on 31 campaigns because stock was low.
Could this work for your store?
The builder, the rule mapping and the fan-out publishing work for any BigCommerce store.
What changes per store: your promotion categories, your naming and your stock thresholds.
If some of your products cannot ship everywhere, promotions need to respect that too. The checkout compliance build keeps promos off products that cannot ship to the visitor.
See the checkout compliance offerRelated work
Promo badges and deals pages that update themselves
Product cards, product pages, the cart and deals pages show which promotions apply, and they update on their own when a promotion changes or ends.
Read the caseAn owned loyalty program for BigCommerce
Points, VIP tiers, rewards and referrals in a program the retailer owns, with redemptions that become working BigCommerce coupons.
Read the caseSee where your own checkout stands
The first step is the same for every store: a free check of your shipping policy and checkout, sent back as a short video.
BuildPath is run by Ian Mason, a developer with 20 years in ecommerce and search.
- The check is free
- A short video of what we find
- If we find nothing, we tell you that