Discussion - Promotions

Paul Winterhalder

Hi Francesco,

Thanks for reaching out. Certainly our screens and documentation for Promotions could use some more love - we are working on that.

To answer your questions:

Can Users have more than one promotion active at the same time?
Yes. And in that case, the "lowest" price for an item wins.

In the case of automated promotions, what products count towards the "max purchase" limit? If I have a product with the price left "as is" in the Prices list inside that Promotion, does it get counted? More info on this max purchase field would be appreciated.
Hmm - I'm putting a question into the devs on this one.

I have two automated promotions enabled and a User is in the segments used by both, but I don't see them when using the GetElegiblePromotions call. Is this a refresh issue? And if so how do I force a refresh to see them immediately?
Automated promotions are tricky - as a user must "ENTER" the segment to trigger the promotion. If they are already a member of the segment at the time the promotion is created, the automated promotion will not trigger. We are currently improving the user promotions screens to better communicate this behavior - and make it easier to test.

If I have a promotion active where a product is set "not for sale", I don't see that product in the app store, which is the expected behaviour. What if I have another promotion active at the same time where that product is set as available?
What do you mean "as available" - with a particular price? If you mean "as is" I'm pretty sure that "Not for sale" will win - and the product will not being shown.

What if the same thing happens but in promotion #1 the product is "as is" and in promotion #2 it's set with another price value?
Lowest price wins. If promotion #2 is less than the "as is" price than it should be the one shown.

I hope that helps - we'll chime in with more clarifications once I have them from the devs.

Paul.

francesco.lenolli

Hi @Paul-Winterhalder,

Thank you for the quick reply. You got it right for your What do you mean "as available" clarification, thank you for the answer.
I generally have a clearer idea now, but at this point I believe I have an issue with automated promotions:

Yesterday I created a new segment for users with a login count greater or equal than 20, and an automated promotion that triggers for users that enter that segment. The User I'm using met the required login count this morning, but that promotion still isn't available for him. I have an active scheduled promotion that works just fine and I'm able to get its data from Braincloud, it's just the automated ones that are causing problems.

We're using BC for a game made with Unity, I don't know if this info is useful but if you need more data on our project I'd be happy to share it with you, in the meantime I'll wait for the rest of the clarifications, thank you in advance.

Francesco.

JasonL

Make sure you have enabled that promotion, can you provide us with your AppId and that automated promotionId?

francesco.lenolli

@JasonL
Hi Jason, my promotions are set as enabled, the AppID is 14866 and the promotions IDs are 4, 5 and 6.

francesco.lenolli

@JasonL @Paul-Winterhalder

Hi everyone, I managed to get an automated promotion to show up on my User.
The automated promotion had a duration of 100000, it was an exaggerated value to just have it always available, and after setting it to 8 it immediately showed up on my User's elegible promotions list.
It seems like the max duration accepted by the system is 596 hours.

I don't remember seeing a reference to a max duration on the official documentation, can you tell me more about this?

Francesco.

JasonL

@francesco-lenolli
Excellent observation! You are correct. Our server-side validation was set to filter out any duration above 596 hours and mark it as "expired". However, we have thoroughly reviewed this validation and have since removed it. This patch will be deployed to our server today, meaning a duration limit will no longer exist. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. Thank you.

francesco.lenolli

@JasonL
Hi Jason, glad to be of help! Any info on the rest of the observations I made earlier in this thread?

JasonL

@francesco-lenolli
Could you specify which part you are still confused about?

francesco.lenolli

@JasonL
Looking back, I realized I forgot to mention a couple of things—sorry about that. I'll list them here:

Is there a way to determine how many purchases a user has made of products affected by a given promotion? This is especially relevant for automated promotions, which have a "max purchases" value but no "purchases left" value in their data structure.
For automated promotions again, is there a way to check how much time is left before a promotion is disabled? A Unix timestamp indicating when the promotion became active would be useful for this purpose.

Both values would be helpful for displaying accurate promotion data to the user across multiple sessions.

JasonL

@francesco-lenolli
For both of your questions, a single call -- GetEligiblePromotions() will do the work. It will return the values of maxPurchases and the caller's purchased, as well as the Unix timestamps for triggeredForUserAt and 'expiresForUserAt` for automated promotions.

francesco.lenolli

@JasonL
Thank you for the info, much appreciated!