WebSphere Commerce provides the infrastructure to offer your customers a wide variety of discounts. Discounts are created by Merchants using the Discount wizard in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
There are two discount infrastructures currently available: a schema-based system which stores the defined discounts using tables in the commerce database; and a rule-based system which stores the discounts as rules in the rule server in the commerce server. The schema-based discount system is an older, less robust system, which is maintained for those sites being upgraded from previous versions. If you are creating a new site, you should strongly consider implementing the rule-based discount system.
Discounts can be either active, or inactive. Discounts are set as active by default when created, but can be deactivated at any time using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. For example, you might want to deactivate a discount before it expires if you notice that the inventory level for a discounted product is too low for the increased demand.
In either case, discounts are calculated and applied by the Order commands during checkout.
Schema-based discounts
Once created, schema-based discounts must be deployed to the production server. Schema-based discounts created using the Loader utility, or imported during migration from previous versions will function correctly, but may not display properly in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
Upon changing a schema-based discount from active to inactive, you must propagate the discount to the production server for the change to take effect.