Is there a flexible promotion & discount rules engine? [closed]

Question

Company I'm working with is looking to implement a flexible and extensible promotion/discount engine for their e-commerce store. Requirements for promotions & discounts change very frequently and business is unable to predict what sort of ideas and promotions they're going to run in the next 3 months, let alone 3 years.

I'd like to make sure that they build a flexible promotion evaluation engine that can take items in the shopping cart, their user profile information, and apply all sorts of rules based upon the datetime, promotion code they've entered, their profile, the items in their cart, http context where they came from, etc.

Are there any third party open-source or commercial libraries that we can use? We only need an evaluation engine, not a persistence engine, because e-commerce site is running in the cloud on top of Windows Azure and storage is in their Azure storage, which very few libraries are compatible with. So, any SQL-based solutions will not work.

Hendrix

How did you end up solving your problem? Did you use one of the rules engines below, or did you write your own? – Arthritis

First pass at this was custom built with only basic rule support. Engine has been abstracted away so that it can be switched if necessary – Hendrix

We have a commercial product called Enticify that may work for you. It is a rules engine with promotional semantics, optimised for ecommerce. It supports cart, profile, times, promo codes, custom qualifiers etc. It is in production with Microsoft Commerce Server customers (we have a specific connector for MSCS) but the pure .NET API is in private beta currently (hence me not adding as an answer). Would be happy to chat with you about it. Contact Enticify or me @bentayloruk. – Decurion

Answer 1

You might want to look at InRule as well. It is scalable and has been tested in Azure.

Confluent

Answer 2

Common Knowledge from Object Connections is a general rules engine that may suite. I have used it for representing some rules we previously managed using a sript engine and it has worked well but not sure if it would be suitable for your specific problem.

Regards Denzil

Kitten

Answer 3

You may want to check out the Enigma RulesEngine. It is a simple, easy-to-use deterministic rules engine that I wrote when I had a situation very similar to what you describe.

It has a workflow interface for defining rules and rules can be stored in files, zip files, or databases.

Rachitis