What merchants actually build with it.
Eight situations, and the exact setup that answers each one. Every result below describes what the setup does, not a measured outcome.
Pick the one that sounds like you.
The £70 basket that should be £100
Average order sits just under the free-shipping threshold, and shoppers abandon rather than add.
A spend-band reward — 5% at £50, 10% plus free shipping at £100, 15% plus a gift at £200 — qualified on cart total, applied cart-wide, capped so the total discount can never exceed the store’s floor.
Shoppers can see the next rung and reach for it.
[Placeholder: AOV lift — to be replaced with real data]
Rewarding the refill habit
Customers buy once and drift to whoever emails them first.
A four-tier points programme where higher tiers earn faster, plus a Quick Start offer giving gold members triple points on their own brand.
A reason to buy the refill from you instead of the marketplace.
Thin margins, no room for error
One flat promotion across a catalogue where some items carry 40% margin and some carry 6%.
Margin groups per category, with accessories allowed a deep discount and core hardware protected by a hard floor. Every promotion checked against the group.
Promotions that never sell a laptop at a loss, without anyone policing it manually.
Moving a specific category
Too much stock in one category, and a sitewide discount would give it all away.
A product-group reward — spend £40 within that group and get 15% off that group only, with the rest of the basket untouched, plus a restriction list so already-marked-down lines are excluded.
The category moves without discounting the whole shop.
High value, long consideration
Big-ticket shoppers browse for weeks and buy once.
An offer for anyone who spent over a threshold in the last twelve months, combined with free delivery as a tier perk on their most expensive range.
The returning high-value customer gets a reason to come back that a discount code cannot copy.
One system, many storefronts
Different brands, different margins, different teams, no central control.
One account, several stores and channels, role-based access per team, and per-channel promotion rules.
Each brand runs its own offers; the group keeps one set of margin limits.
The named list
400 customers have not ordered in nine months.
An individual-customer audience built from that exact list, a generous one-off gift-card reward, capped at one redemption per person and expiring in 14 days.
A targeted, budget-capped win-back that costs nothing on customers who were coming back anyway.
Black Friday without the hangover
Everything discounted, offers stacking, no visibility until the invoices land.
Stacking rules that let shipping combine with a product discount but never two product discounts, an order-level cap on the total discount, a lifetime budget on the campaign, and daily burn tracking.
A peak weekend where the discount bill is known while it is happening, not three weeks later.
Start from what you are trying to do.
Stop discounting blind.
See Perkqi running against your own catalogue. We will build your first margin-safe offer with you on the call.