Promotions system
Architecture overview
Solidus ships with a powerful rule-based promotions system that allows you to grant flexible discounts to your customers in many different scenarios. You can apply discounts to the entire order, to a single line item or a set of line items, or to the shipping fees.
In order to achieve this level of flexibility, the promotions system is composed of four concepts:
- Promotion handlers are responsible for activating a promotion at the right step of the customer experience.
- Promotion rules are responsible for checking whether an order is eligible for a promotion.
- Promotion actions are responsible for defining the discount(s) to be applied to eligible orders.
- Adjustments are responsible for storing discount information. Promotion adjustments are recalculated every time the order is updated, to check if their eligibility persists when the state of the order changes. It is possible to customize how this recalculation behaves.
Adjustments go beyond promotions and apply to other concepts that modify the order amount. Taxes are another good example.
Let's take the example of the following promotion:
Apply free shipping on any orders whose total is $100 USD or greater.
Here's the flow Solidus follows to apply such a promotion:
- When the customer enters their shipping information,
the
Shippingpromotion handler activates the promotion on the order. - When activated, the promotion will perform some basic eligibility checks ( e.g. usage limit, validity dates) and then ensure the defined promotion rules are met.
- When called,
the
ItemTotalpromotion rule will ensure the order's total is $100 USD or greater. - Since the order is eligible for the promotion,
the
FreeShippingaction is applied to the order's shipment. The action creates an adjustment that cancels the cost of the shipment. - The customer gets free shipping!
This is the architecture at a glance. As you can see, Solidus already ships with some useful handlers, rules, and actions out of the box.
However, you're not limited to using the stock functionality. In fact, the promotions system shows its full potential when you use it to implement your own logic. In the rest of the guide, we'll use the promotions system to implement the following requirements:
We want to uphold a partnership with a new payment platform by offering a 50% shipping discount when customers pay with it during the checkout.
In order to do this, we'll have to implement our own handler, rule, and action. Let's get to work!
Implementing a new handler
There's nothing special about promotion handlers: technically, they're just plain old Ruby objects that are created and called in the right places during the checkout flow.
There is no unified API for promotion handlers, but we can take inspiration from the existing ones and use a similar format:
# frozen_string_literal: true
module AmazingStore
module PromotionHandler
class Payment
RULES_TYPE = 'AmazingStore::Promotion::Rules::Payment'
attr_reader :order
def initialize(order)
@order = order
end
def activate
promotions.each do |promotion|
promotion.activate(order: order) if promotion.eligible?(order)
end
end
private
def promotions
::Spree::Promotion.
active.
joins(:promotion_rules).
where('promotion_rules.type' => RULES_TYPE)
end
end
end
end
Our promotion handler selects a subset of promotions with a specific rule type that we haven't yet created. Then, it activates the eligible ones, i.e., those who obey its rules.
Remember that promotion handlers simply apply active promotions to the current order at the correct stage of the order workflow. While other handlers might pick up our promotions, they won't be able to activate it if they run before the payment step. With the new handler, we want to ensure that promotions can be activated after a payment method has been selected for the order.
Let's call our handler as a callback after the checkout flow has transitioned from the :payment
state (see
the section on how to customize state machines):
# frozen_string_literal: true
module AmazingStore
module LoadPaymentPromotionHandler
def self.prepended(base)
base.state_machine.after_transition(from: :payment) do |order|
AmazingStore::PromotionHandler::Payment.new(order).activate
end
end
::Spree::Order.prepend(self)
end
end
Implementing a new rule
Now that we have our handler, let's move on and implement the promotion rule that checks whether the customer is using the promoted payment method.
We'll allow store admins to edit which payment method carries the discount. The best way to do that is to create a preference for the promotion rule itself:
# frozen_string_literal: true
module AmazingStore
module Promotion
module Rules
class Payment < ::Spree::PromotionRule
DEFAULT_PREFERRED_PAYMENT_TYPE = 'AmazingStore::AmazingPaymentPlatform'
ALLOWED_PAYMENT_TYPES = [
DEFAULT_PREFERRED_PAYMENT_TYPE,
'Spree::PaymentMethod::Check',
'Spree::PaymentMethod::CreditCard'
].freeze
preference :payment_type, :string, default: DEFAULT_PREFERRED_PAYMENT_TYPE
validates :preferred_payment_type, inclusion: {
in: ALLOWED_PAYMENT_TYPES,
allow_blank: true
}, on: :update
def applicable?(promotable)
promotable.is_a?(::Spree::Order)
end
def eligible?(order, _options = {})
order.payments.any? do |payment|
payment.payment_method.type == preferred_payment_type
end
end
end
end
end
end
You may have noticed that we allow the payment type to be blank on creation. This is because promotion rules are initially created without any of their preferences, so that the correct form can be presented to the admin when configuring the rule. If we enforced the presence of a payment type since the very beginning, Solidus wouldn't be able to create the promotion rule and admins would get an error.
Now that we have the implementation of our promotion rule, we also need to give admins a nice UI
where they can manage the rule and enter the promoted payment type. We just need to create the right
partial, where we'll have a local variable promotion_rule available to access the current
promotion rule instance:
<div class="row">
<div class="col-6">
<div class="field">
<%= promotion_rule.class.human_attribute_name(:payment_type) %>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-6">
<div class="field">
<%= select_tag "#{param_prefix}[preferred_payment_type]", options_for_select(promotion_rule.class::ALLOWED_PAYMENT_TYPES, promotion_rule.preferred_payment_type), class: 'fullwidth' %>
</div>
</div>
</div>
The last step is to register our new promotion rule in an initializer:
# ...
Rails.application.config.spree.promotions.rules << 'AmazingStore::Promotion::Rules::Payment'
When you create a new promotion in the backend, we should now see the Payment promotion rule. For a better experience, we can associate a description so that it's rendered along its form:
en:
# ...
activerecord:
attributes:
amazing_store/promotion/rules/payment:
description: Must use the specified payment method
Implementing a new action
Finally, let's implement the promotion action that will grant customers a 50% shipping discount. In
order to do that, we can take inspiration from the
existing FreeShipping
action:
# frozen_string_literal: true
module AmazingStore
module Promotion
module Actions
class HalfShipping < ::Spree::PromotionAction
# The `perform` method is called when an action is applied to an order or line
# item. The payload contains a lot of useful context:
# https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/blob/64b6b6eaf902337983c487cf10dfada8dbfc5160/core/app/models/spree/promotion.rb#L129
def perform(payload = {})
order = payload[:order]
promotion_code = payload[:promotion_code]
results = order.shipments.map do |shipment|
# If the shipment has already been discounted by this promotion action,
# we skip it.
next false if shipment.adjustments.where(source: self).exists?
# If not, we create an adjustment to apply a 50% discount on the shipment.
shipment.adjustments.create!(
order: shipment.order,
amount: compute_amount(shipment),
source: self,
promotion_code: promotion_code,
label: promotion.name,
)
# We return true here to mark that the shipment has been discounted.
true
end
# `perform` needs to return true if any adjustments have been applied by
# the promotion action. Otherwise, it should return false.
results.any? { |result| result == true }
end
def compute_amount(shipment)
shipment.cost * -0.5
end
# The `remove_from` method should undo any actions done by `perform`. It is
# used when an order becomes ineligible for a given promotion and the promotion
# needs to be removed.
def remove_from(order)
order.shipments.each do |shipment|
shipment.adjustments.each do |adjustment|
if adjustment.source == self
# Here, we simply remove any adjustments on the order's shipments
# created by this promotion action.
shipment.adjustments.destroy!(adjustment)
end
end
end
end
end
end
end
end
As you can see, there's quite a bit going on here, but hopefully, the comments help you with the flow of the action and the purpose of the methods we implemented.
Just like rules, promotion actions can also have preferences and allow admin to define them via the UI. However, in this case, we don't need any of that. Still, Solidus will expect a partial for the action, so we should create an empty ERB file.
<!-- Intentionally empty -->
You can look at
the CreateQuantityAdjustments
action and
the corresponding view
for an example of actions with preferences.
Finally, we need to register our action by adding the following to an initializer:
# ...
Rails.application.config.spree.promotions.actions << 'AmazingStore::Promotion::Actions::HalfShipping'
Like before, let's add a human-friendly description:
en:
# ...
activerecord:
attributes:
amazing_store/promotion/actions/half_shipping:
description: Applies 50% discount in shipping
Restart the server and you should now see your new promotion action!
Let's try it out!
First of all, go to the Promotions section on the backend and click New Promotion. In this case, it makes sense to check the Apply to all orders option, as our promotion doesn't need a code. Once the promotion has been created, add the Payment rule and the Half shipping action.
You can now go to the frontend and see how the shipment price is dropped by 50% if you select the configured payment method.