Shopify's New Price Rules API Increases Flexibility

Have you ever used a discount code or availed a special offer while making an online purchase?

I bet everyone has and it feels nice to have these special discounts. But managing offers, discounts and pricing is not an easy task.

Daria Kourilina— Shopify’s Product Manager for discounts — at Shopify’s Unite conference shared that almost one in five sales completed online last year were completed using a discount code.

Here is the full video:

Also, signup discounts and offers increase the daily visits of an online store and most of the ecommerce platforms have something relating to discounts. Having said that, discount codes and unique pricing are powerful inducement for shopping, upsells, customer loyalty and so on. But on top of that, many online businesses have complex pricing and that is where the difficulty originates.

Shopify introduced the all-new price rules API to give app developers who create marketing, sales and loyalty program app, a chance to help merchants succeed.

Previously this feature was available only to Shopify Plus merchants but now the doors have been unlocked totally.

Since this has got a decent UI, the store admin can create the discount manually as well and run the store. Not that you ought to get an app!!

create-discount-in-shopify — *Create Discount in Shopify*

There are different options and criteria which can be set while discount codes are created.

discount-options-in-shopify — *Criteria for Creating a Discount Code Manually*

The original features of the discounts API merged up with some new ideas and with this newfound yet controlling API, one can announce the following:

Fixed percentage discount
Fixed dollar amount discount
Free Shipping
Create new discount codes
Update existing discount codes/rules
Delete old discount rules

This means the new marketing apps should be able to:

develop apps for applying specific discounts based on product collections, customer groups and more.
combine multiple conditions to create discount rules (free shipping on a minimum order amount, free shipping to specific Customer Groups, special discounts to specific customer group, amount or percentage discount to new customers etc.,)
set up discounts set up for a minimum number of cart items

The new price rules API might allow app developers to come up with apps like –

Loyalty Program – Target specific customers and give them a special treatment.
Email Marketing App – Email marketing is a tried and true tactic for driving sales. Along with this tactic, however, is a common expectation that merchant emails will contain discounts and special offers.
Upsell App – Showcasing complementary items, announcing new stock, or including reminders to reorder, a merchant can now further tempt customers to check-out by including special discounts as part of an upsell.
Inventory report and Pricing strategy – Report generating apps which would indicate which items are being bought using discount codes. Items which are like hot cake and gets sold out immediately using discount codes.
B2B enablement and pricing: Perhaps this new feature would be able to help the B2B businesses to cope up with multiple levels of pricing as well.

If you are a developer and have a decent idea APIs and web services, you can check out this link for a reference.

Now, you can easily integrate your Shopify Store with the back-end ERP/CRM or POS System to automate the Business Process!

Shopify’s New Price Rules API Increases Flexibility

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Let’s start integrating!