For outside TR sales, such as festivals and farmer markets, we use different pricing on our wines so that the total with tax is on the dollar - that way we don’t have to bring coinage to make change. We set up a festival pricing level, and a generic festival customer to use that pricing. That all works except that we first have to look up the festival customer on every transaction to get the pricing since the default is always “guest customer” - that usually takes an extra 20 seconds to do. Not so bad when you only have 10 customers at a farmers market, but when you have a large festival and a hundreds of customers the delay really adds up. I had sent a request to Vin65 support to allow the default customer to be set on any POS profile, or individual POS device, but don’t know if or when that will happen. Has anybody run into this and have a better way of handling it?
I would recommend creating and using a “Festival” order type, then setting your festival discount promos to apply to only that Order Type. Then you can create a POS Profile that you only use for festivals that is set to the Festival Order Type by default. This way all festival visitors get the fest pricing, and you don’t have to stick them all on one Customer. Big bonus here is that you can actually use the email receipts and follow up with the new customers that you have forged a new relationship with since they will each be new unique Contacts in your system.
The “festival” pricing we want to use for each wine is not based on a discount percentage. We determine each price individually based on the rounded dollar amount once we add our lovely 9% alcohol tax. For example, we have a $11.99 wine that at the winery costs $13.07 with the tax. For a festival we want to price it at $13.00 including tax, so the festival price is $11.93 - that is a discount of .5%. We have another wine that sells for $18.99, and with tax that is $20.70. But at a festival we want to price it at $20 even, meaning the festival wine price is $18.35. That is a discount of 3.8%. As such, the actual discount percentage to get the total cost to an even dollar amount will vary depending on the cost of the wine - in some cases it will even be a negative discount. I see how your recommendation would work if we were doing a fixed discount for all of the wines, but not with varying prices. Unless I am missing something, it looks like the only option on the promos is a fixed discount.
Whoops. I chimed along with @danjimerson, but forgot there is no promo by Order Type.
So what I do do in this case… we sell a limited selection of wines at our concert events, and do the tax-on-the-dollar pricing. I just made up a separate product/SKU for each wine we do sell, set the pricing, and transfer the wine to a special event pool so that it is easier to clean it up later.
If you didn’t want to do that… you could create a promo for each pricing level - one for $11.99, one for $18.99, and so on - and then apply them as coupons in POS, which is much faster than using a fake customer.
Drink lots of water.
Right, there is no promo by Order Type, but making a promo to apply only to an Order Type is as simple as it gets by checking only the Festival type under the promo’s Order Types.
From there I do kind of what @ElJefe described, but since my Festival “pricing level” promos only apply to the Festival Order Type, the promos apply automatically and I do not need to use coupons for my Festival setup. I believe it is generally accepted around here that using Promos > Price levels in pretty much every scenario.
D’oh! Right!
OK, but isn’t the promo discount limited to a fixed discount amount? Still not understanding how this would work for my varying discounts needed for multiple wines to hit the even $.
Sounds like the separate SKU and inventory pool would work though.
Since to reach the prices that you are shooting for you are discounting by varying amounts, you will need multiple promos. As many promos as wines (or price points) you are intending to sell at the festival.
For example, if you have three wines and two of them need to be set to the same price, you can create a promo that works by “Promotion on Select Products” and select both of the products that will be reduced by the same amount. One promo per wine/price point should do it, and make sure to couple them together.
Or again as @ElJefe said you can create new products just for the festival and sell those. I think it’s the inventory issues that make me avoid that route but there is no reason at all that it wouldn’t work.
We go with the duplicate item system here. We have Wine X as one SKU and then Event Wine X as another SKU. Depending on where our events are, there are different tax rates, so before each event we go in and set the price and the tax to what we need them to be. Then we transfer inventory from our main “ecommerce” inventory into the event inventory. When we come back, we transfer the left over inventory back into ecommerce. We also have an event order type set up so that when we run our reports we can just select that order type for the time frame the event took place and see everything we need to see.