Promotions
Overview
Promotions within Spree are used to provide discounts to orders, offer free shipping or to add potential additional items at no extra cost (eg. samples).
Promotions are one of the most complex areas within Spree, as there are a large number of moving parts to consider. Although this guide will explain Promotions from a developer’s perspective, if you are new to this area you can learn a lot from the Admin > Promotions tab where you can set up new Promotions, edit rules & actions, etc.
Promotions can be activated in three different ways:
- When a user adds a product to their cart (automatic promotions, eg. free shipping with a threshold)
- When a user enters a coupon code during the checkout process
- When a user visits a page within the Spree store (path-based promotions, eg. a promotion that offers a discount on a specific page)
Promotions for these individual ways are activated through their corresponding PromotionHandler class, once they’ve been checked for eligibility.
Promotions relate to two other main components: actions and rules. When a promotion is activated, the actions for the promotion are performed, passing in the payload from the fire_event call that triggered the activator becoming active. Rules are used to determine if a promotion meets certain criteria in order to be applicable.
Here is a table showcasing the attributes of the Spree::Promotion model along with a description for each attribute and example values:
| Attribute | Description | Example Value |
|---|---|---|
name | The name of the promotion | Summer Sale |
description | A brief description of the promotion | Discounts for summer |
expires_at | The expiration date and time of the promotion | 2025-09-01 23:59:59 |
starts_at | The start date and time of the promotion | 2025-06-01 00:00:00 |
code | A code that users can enter to apply the promotion | SUMMER2023 |
usage_limit | The total number of times the promotion can be used | 500 |
match_policy | The policy for how promotion rules are matched | all |
path | The specific path that activates the promotion | /summer-sale |
per_code_usage_limit | The number of times a single code can be used | 1 |
Path-based promotions will only work when the Spree::PromotionHandler::Page class is used, as in Spree::ContentController from spree_rails_frontend gem
Actions
There are four actions that come with Spree:
Rules
Here’s a list of all the rules that come with Spree:
Rules are used by Spree to determine if a promotion is applicable to an order and can be matched in one of two ways: all of the rules must match, or one rule must match. This is determined by the match_policy attribute on the Promotion object. As you will see in the Admin, you can set the match_policy to be “any” or “all” of the rules associated with the Promotion. When set to “any” the Promotion will be considered eligible if any one of the rules applies, when set to “all” it will be eligible only if all the rules apply.
Extending Promotions
Please follow our extending Promotions guide to learn how to create custom promotion rules and actions.