Introduction

The present concept is addressed to business users.
This concept gives a high level overview of the usage of promotion budgets in the Intershop 7 back office.

Overview

Budget Configuration

A promotion can be valid for all currencies available, or only for a selected one.

When creating a promotion in the back office for a dedicated currency a budget with the following properties can be configured:

• Budget amount
• Budget source (if any provided)
• Specifying, whether the promotion should go offline when the budget is exceeded
• E-mail address, where to send a notification e-mail in one of the following cases:
  • The budget falls below a defined threshold
  • The budget is exceeded

If the budget of a promotion is exceeded the negative remaining budget value is shown, but the promotion still applies for all user sessions which are already opened at that moment. To reactivate this promotion the originally budget amount must be increased by the absolute value of the remaining promotion budget.

The philosophy is: A promotion already applied to the shopping cart will not be removed, even if its budget is completely consumed meanwhile by another transaction.

Budget Source

A budget source is an arbitrary text. For example, the name of a department the budget comes from. It has no impact on the promotion appliance. A set of budget sources can be defined for different locales at <channel> > Channel Preferences > Promotion Preferences: Budget Sources.

Budget Notification

As mentioned before, a promotion can be configured to trigger a notification e-mail. The following settings are configured as default, but can be changed at <channel> > Applications > <application> - Promotions under Budget Notification.

To store the localized subjects the localization framework will be used. The Email From Address field defines the sender's address. The layout of the e-mail is defined by the e-mail templates. Furthermore, the following placeholders can be used to define dynamic e-mail subjects:

{{PROMOTION}} - inserts the name of the promotion
{{BUDGET}}    - inserts the defined budget value
{{THRESHOLD}} - inserts the defined threshold

For example, the subject line:

"{{THRESHOLD}} % of {{PROMOTION}}'s budget reached"

will be substituted to

"50.0% of Promotion1's budget reached"

As mentioned above, there exist 2 e-mail templates.

It is possible to change the layout or to create a new layout at any time. Any changes affect only the current application e.g., B2C Web Shop. Keep in mind that for every other application the default values are still present.
Changing the default values causes new database entries in table Application Preference for that application.

Implementation Concept

The IS7 budget framework is used to implement the budget feature. It is not an own independent framework but it is a part of the promotion framework. With other words there are some classes to process the budget handling. When creating a promotion for a dedicated currency, an account and a budget is created. Both account and budget strongly depend on that promotion: if the promotion is deleted, the associated budget and account will be deleted as well. During the order calculation process in the storefront, the saved amount is calculated for the applying promotion and added as an AccountTransaction to the account.

An account transaction is an event of certain entities like:
* [budget] * money (financial transactions) * [order]s * inquiries booked in an [account].
These transactions are summarized in the account for reporting purposes and account analysis.