Creating a Magento shopping cart rule

Creating a Magento shopping cart price rule can look very complicated at first, but once you know what you’re doing it’s very easy. Read on to see how it should be done.

What are Magento shopping cart pricerules?
Shopping cart price rules give you the opportunity to give discounts to certain customers during the checkout process. The discount will be calculated once the customer arrives in the cart. These rules give your customers a nice incentive to finish the transaction.

Using coupons or not
The shopping cart price rules functionality in Magento offer you the possibility to let customers fill in a coupon code before getting the discount, or to calculate the discount immediately without the need of a coupon. Coupon codes have the big advantage that you can spread these on the internet or in other venues as a promotional tool. Magento offers the possibility to bulk generate coupon codes, but if you'd like to bulk import your own coupons, you can use the Magento Coupon Import Extension by Plugin Company. Rules without coupon codes can be great for offering discounts on certain product combinations or specific destinations or customer groups. 

Creating your first shopping cart price rule
Create your first shopping cart price rule is pretty simple, you have to navigate to “Promotions>Shopping Cart Price Rules” in the Magento admin environment. Of course you will first need to log in to your shop.

Once you’re at the shopping cart price rule screen, click on ‘Add new rule’ to create a new shopping cart price rule. On the ‘new rule’ page, you have several tabs:

Rule information:
Here you specify the name, the description and in which for which customer groups the rule should be active. You can also specify here whether to use a coupon, use coupon auto generation and so forth.  If you don’t fill in a from a to date, the rule will be always active (as long as the rule status is set to enabled)’

Conditions
On the conditions tab you can specify in what events the rules should be triggered. You can let a rule be triggered on for example a product combination, the total of the cart, shipping destination and many other things. I recommend you check out the conditions yourself to see what it’s all about. The system is very flexible, giving you a lot of options to play with. Of course, Magento offers a lot of options in almost any aspect of the web shop, so better get used to it J

Actions
On the actions tab you specify which actions the Magento system should take once a rule is triggered. Here you can set up the discount to be offered, free shipping and other deal options. If you set ‘stop further rules processing’ to yes, no other rules will be triggered after the current rule. You can also filter the actions so they are only applied to specific products.

Labels
On the labels tab, you can specify the label that the customer will see when given the discount.

This is pretty much it. Simply fill in the form and you will have created your very own first Magento shopping cart price rule! Once a customer places an order and the conditions are met and/or the coupon are filled in, he or she will receive the discount set in the actions tab.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below!