The first Ricochet update of 2021: coupon codes are live!

Illustration of a coupon with midcentury styling.

Coupon codes are officially a part of Ricochet! And what’s even better, they work both in your store and online! In addition, we’ve completely overhauled and updated the discount management system to increase the types of discounts you can create, and allow your store to have much more flexibility around your pricing and sales.

2020 has been a wild year for all of us. Here at Ricochet, we’ve been fortunate enough to continue expanding and improving on the core software to make it more effective at running at a contemporary consignment store. This first update is one of the most exciting and is setting the stage for a lot more to come later this year.

There’s a lot to cover, so we’re going to showcase a few of the new features and then explain how you can use them to create a variety of common discounts and store sales.

Ricochet’s discount system is more capable than ever before.

About two years ago we expanded upon our original system to allow stores to create discounts based on a few unique parameters. With that update, stores could create discounts for specific consignors or vendors, categories, or simply across their entire store.

With the new update, we are dramatically expanding on that. Now with Ricochet, you can create discounts based on:

  • Consignors or vendors (yes, multiple at once!)
  • Individual SKUs
  • Categories
  • Your custom fields
  • Brands
  • Departments

Any of these parameters can be selected when creating a store-wide discount, and multiple variants of that parameter can be used at once. So if you want to create a discount for all shoes, both men’s and women’s, you only have to manage one discount.

Additionally, you can create discounts based on your custom fields! If you have a very specific organization for your products, discounts can be applied and organized according to that system.

Screenshot of the new Ricochet Discount configuration tool

Discounts can now be automatically triggered by a date.

Running a back-to-school sale? Well, now you can have Ricochet manage when that sale is active on its own! All discounts can have a start date and end date. Plan ahead and get your products ready by setting a start date in the future.

Do you have a clearance rack? It’s even easier to create a discount that runs indefinitely for your clearance items.

We also kept the ability to manually turn a sale on and off with a single click. If you have special weekly sales or discounts that periodically turn on and off, you don’t have to delete and recreate that discount; just activate it as you need.

Discounts can be limited by the number of uses.

Sometimes you have an excess of a certain amount of items and you want to get rid of a large amount of them as fast as possible. With usage limits, you can limit the number of times you want a discount to be available across your entire store. A good example of this would be a blowout sale where the next 50 pairs of jeans sold in your store are 30% off.

Coupon codes can be required and generated.

We can’t tell you how many times this has been requested, and it’s finally here! All discounts in Ricochet can be triggered either automatically, or by coupon code. The best part is that this works both online and in-store! There’s no need to try and manage two different marketplaces and hope that everything matches or that items don’t sell out.

Additionally, you can have Ricochet generate a random coupon code for you if needed.

We’ve updated both the POS and the online checkout to support actions for applying coupon codes.

Create minimum requirements to drive increased cart size.

All discounts can now have one of two measurements for minimum requirements: item quantity or cart value.

Let’s say that you want to run a sale that says “20% off when you buy 3 candles.” Now you can! Or if you want to create a sale that says “$20 back when you spend $100 or more this holiday season,” both of those functions are easily doable with the new discount system.

Discounts can be online or in-store only.

Trying to drive traffic and awareness to your website? All discounts can be toggled to trigger online, in-store, or both. The new dashboard also gives you a quick view of which sales you are currently running on which platform, making it easier to understand what sales are happening where.

The updated dashboard lets you hide old discounts for visual clarity.

There are many stores that use sales very frequently, and after a few years, it’s not uncommon to see dozens, if not, hundreds of discounts taking up your valuable screen space. All discounts can now be archived for more visual consistency.

Also, if you ever want to bring back an old discount that you have archived, you can always find it and restore it to your primary dashboard.

 

Screenshot of the new Ricochet Discounts dashboard.

Free shipping thresholds

We’ve also updated the way free shipping operates for Ricochet Web Store users. So many stores are trying to drive more online sales than ever before, and one of the best ways to do that is to simply ship products for free.

You can still create basic free shipping rules based on the weight of products as normal. But now you can also create free shipping bonuses when customers either reach an item quantity in their cart, or hit a spending threshold.

This makes it super easy to offer common shipping promotions such as “Free Shipping when you spend $100 or more online.”

Our Support Center has over a dozen common discount types and step-by-step instructions on how to create them.

Check out our comprehensive support center for detailed walkthroughs and use-cases of the most common discount types.

There are literally endless ways you can offer specials and promotions to your customers with Ricochet. Let us know if you ever have any questions or feedback for our team!