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Facing the long holiday of National Day in October when there is a large number of tourists arriving, retailers are putting forward effective promotion strategies to stimulate buying interest, hoping to take advantage of the Golden Week to maximize the profits of the Company.

Widely used promotion rules in the market include : designated product/category discount; buy more to get gifts/greater discounts; discounts based on buying quantity/purchase amount; member discounts; shop discounts; coupons; discount card; discounts during promotion period; sliding discount scale based on quantity/purchase amount; or even more complicated, different discount rates for every item purchased. Retailers can also add other conditions, say rule priorities or exclusiveness, to make up with their own effective promotion strategies.

Easier said than done. If retailers do not have a reliable and versatile promotion engine to help them apply these promotion rules in POS transactions, front end staff will have to calculate manually the discounts and privileges customers can enjoy. The time to process POS transactions will become unusually long. Human errors and a long queue of customers are unavoidable.

The best promotion engine should be one that has the capabilities to handle large numbers of promotion rules in POS transactions, process the rules fast and accurate, saving front end staff from making mistakes, and effectively help retailers to gain more business greater profits. It should come up with user friendly interface to allow retailers to set hundreds of promotion rules easily. At POS settlement, it will calculate and apply automatically the appropriate discounts or privileges to customers according to the preset rules. The discount percentages, discount prices or free gift offers are then list clearly on the customer receipts.

More than these, a good promotion engine should be able to generate detailed analysis reports to let retailers study the effectiveness and tangible benefits of each rule and find out the optimal balance between lesser profits and quicker turnover. This will help retailers to well prepare for future strategic plans of promotions either in peak or low seasons.