A purchase plan is used to provide special pricing on specific products for a selected group of shoppers. You define which products you want to make available and at what price, and how you want to control access for shoppers.
Note: To create purchase plans for your site, your site must first have the purchase plan option enabled. Contact your Store Operations team to have purchase plans enabled on your site.
How Purchase Plans Work
A purchase plan controls what product(s) a shopper can purchase, dictates the price for those products, and limits purchases to shoppers who have been authenticated to shop within the purchase plan portal.
Purchase plans are a site-level feature, meaning they are enabled and set up on a site-by-site basis. Companies with multiple sites can enable or disable purchase plans in one or more of their sites.
Creating Purchase Plans
Creating a purchase plan is done using a wizard that walks you through the creation process step-by-step. There are several settings that define how the purchase plan behaves and how shoppers interact with the purchase plan. You should know how you want your purchase plan to behave before you create it. The following are some questions you should ask when you consider creating a purchase plan. Once you know these answers, working through the purchase plan wizard will be easier.
- How do you want to validate shoppers who wish to access the purchase plan? For example, do you want to use a shopper's email address or IP address to verify that they can access the purchase plan?
- What price list will the purchase plan use by default? You can set special prices for the purchase plan but every purchase plan must be associated with an existing price list on your site.
- What type of discount or special pricing do you want products in the purchase plan to use?
- Do you want to limit how many times a shopper can make a purchase from the purchase plan?
- What theme will the purchase plan use? Do you want to use a special theme based on how the shopper is validated to access the plan? For example, you can use one theme for the purchase plan by default, and use another theme for shoppers who are validated a certain way like email address. This allows you to control the look and feel of your store for the different groups of shoppers you provide access to your purchase plan.
- How long do you want the purchase plan to be active?
- What products will be available in the purchase plan? Will products be discounted or priced differently, or will all products in the plan be priced and restricted the same?
- What type of marketing offers (if any) will you use to promote your purchase plan?
Activation Rules and Controlling Shopper Access
When you create a purchase plan, you can control how shoppers are allowed to shop the plan by creating rules that dictate who can shop a purchase plan (who is activated for the purchase plan). Once a shopper gains access to the purchase plan site, they can browse products and complete a purchase just as they would on your normal site.
There are four main types of rules you can use to validate shoppers for your purchase plan:
- Generic Identifier – Provides access based on an ID and password that is the same for all shoppers.
- Email Address – Provides access based on the email address of the shopper.
- IP Address – Provides access based on the IP address of the shopper. You can indicate a single IP address or specify the range of IP addresses that should get access to the purchase plan.
- Referral URL – Provides access based on the URL the shopper clicked to access the purchase plan.
Shoppers who attempt to use a purchase plan that has been retired or for which they do not have access will be given a message on the storefront informing them that they cannot be authenticated to shop the purchase plan.
Defining the Purchase Plan Timeframe
When you create a purchase plan you can choose when the plan will start or end on your store. Since you can create multiple purchase plans and set those dates differently, you can create a series of plans that start and end right after one another, providing constant coverage but adjusting the products and/or pricing as time goes on.
Restricting How Often a Shopper Can Purchase
You can restrict how often a shopper can purchase from a purchase plan, if needed (by default there are no shopper restrictions for purchase plans).
There are three ways you can control how many purchases a shopper can make in a purchase plan:
- By Purchase Plan Lifetime – You can define a maximum number of purchases a shopper can make during the lifetime of the purchase plan. The lifetime of the purchase plan is defined by the Start Date and End Date you set when the purchase plan is created.
- By Calendar – You can define the maximum number of purchases a shopper can make within a specific timeframe (months, quarters, or years). For example, you can limit purchases to one per month, or three per year.
- By Timeframe – You can define the maximum number of purchases a shopper can make within a certain number of days, weeks, or months from their last purchase plan purchase. For example, you can limit purchases to 90 days after their previous purchase plan purchase.
How Restrictions are Enforced
When a shopper places an order for a product in a purchase plan, that purchase is logged for the shopper when the order is submitted (that is, when the shopper clicks the Submit button after entering their billing and shipping information during checkout). This includes orders for pre-order products and orders that are not immediately fulfilled or orders using a delayed payment method.
What this means is that when an order is submitted, the restrictions that have been set for the purchase plan are invoked. If you have restricted the shopper to three purchases from a purchase plan in a year, when they submit their first order they will be able to place two more orders in the purchase plan.
Products in Purchase Plans
Products are added to purchase plans in groups, so that you can define pricing and purchase restrictions differently for each group of products in a purchase plan (plans can have more than one group). A product can only be in one group within a purchase plan but the same product can be added to groups in multiple purchase plans on the site.
If you want to use tiered pricing with a purchase plan, the products you want to add to the plan must have the Volume License Pricing setting enabled. See Volume License Pricing for more information.
Tiered pricing in a purchase plan also means you have to consider how products across groups should be treated. You can have the points a shopper earns for each purchase accumulate across groups within a purchase plan, or limit tiered pricing to each group within the plan. This provides you even more control over the discounts and pricing of products in your purchase plan.
Pricing in Purchase Plans
Pricing in a purchase plan can be two way: fixed pricing and tiered pricing. Fixed pricing means that a single price is set for a product, regardless of how many are purchased and who is doing the purchasing. Tiered pricing means you can change the product price, based on how many the shopper purchases.
How Pricing Appears
When a shopper is viewing a product in a purchase plan, the "original" price for the product (the price set in the price list for the default locale) can also be shown. If the original price appears it will be crossed out (also called "strikethrough pricingWhen the regular or normal price of a product is crossed out, and the sale or promotional price is listed instead.") and the special purchase plan price will appear below or beside the original. If the original price is not set to appear just the price set for the product in the purchase plan will appear.
Marketing Purchase Plans
You can create offers to promote and market your purchase plans. Currently purchase plans only work with the Discount, Featured Banner, and Banner offer types.
Using Offers with Purchase Plans
After you create a purchase plan you can create offers for that purchase plan if you want to provide discounts and special offers to your purchase plan shoppers. There are three types of offers that you can use with a purchase plan:
- Discount
- Featured Banner
- Banner
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