Help With Discounts

[Winelover99]

I need help with discounts. In most situations we have at least 50 items in our "store." We want to incentivize people to buy 2 or more items, not just 1. When I set up a discount "Buy 2 or More Save $5" it is up to the cashier to apply that discount, and there's nothing prohibiting them from doing so even if only 1 item was sold. We use this at events, and at least 20 people are "cashiers" and can sell items on their phones. We don't want to allow that flexibility, as some will give it on every sale just to sell more, even when only selling 1 item.

If we instead try creating an automatic discount, and set up rules, the rules don't really work the way we need them to. If we set the rule to give a $5 discount when 2 or more items are sold, it gives the $5 off on each item automatically, even if we say "When customer purchases any 2 items from" ...If we make the amount $2.50, then it gives $2.50 on every item, which of course we now are giving $7.50 on 3 items and $10 on 4!

I get the auto discount concept, but the rules one can set don't seem to actually work the way we need them to. We simply need it to only allow a discount of $5 maximum when 2 or more items are sold in one transaction. Thanks to those who already tried helping. I wish Square  just had decent customer service help as this is so frustrating!

[TheRealChipA]

Hi @Winelover99.  I understand your frustration. The problem here is that you are trying to do something that (so far) Square Automatic Discounts will not do.  That something is that you want to apply a BOGx discount once and only once per transaction, and only apply it if at least two items are purchased.  Currently, the way auto BOGx discounts work is that they will apply the discount for every x items purchased with no limit.

For example, I can create an automatic discount of $5, type BOGO, that would apply a $5 discount to the next item after an items is added to the cart.  This would apply discounts as follows:

Item 1 - full price

Item 2 - $5 discount

Item 3 - full price

Item 4 - $5 discount

There is where the problem happens.  There is no way to specify that an auto-discount can only be applied once per transaction, period.  Unfortunately, what you want to do is just not possible with Square automatic discounts.  Which means that all I can suggest is for you to head over to the Ideate Board and submit a feature request to the POS team asking them to add a new discount setting to limit the number of auto-discounts allowed per one transaction.  But, as you are probably aware, feature requests have an evaluation process, followed by putting them on the roadmap, followed by coding and testing, etc.  This will not be a quick fix.

Which is my long-winded way of explaining why you will have to trust/rely on your cashiers to do their jobs.  Or come up with a different scheme to encourage people to buy two or more items like 5% (or 4% or whatever) off all items purchased after two are in the cart.

I’m sorry that I can’t give you better news, but this is on of those times when I understand how simple your desire is, I agree that it is simple, but I see that it is absolutely not possible using automatic discounts.  I’m sorry to have to say that.