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Lesson 2.9Flash sales and current offers
Two kinds, one of which discounts and one of which does not, and a limit on visibility that nobody tells you about.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Submit a product to the right kind of promotion and set expectations about whether it will be seen.
Two kinds, and only one is a discount
Helm runs promotions on the Shop home page. Staff create them; sellers submit products into them. There are exactly two types and they do very different things.
| Flash sale | Current offer | |
|---|---|---|
| Changes the price | Yes, a real discount | No |
| What you get | Markdown plus placement | Placement only |
| You must set | A discount from 1% to 90% | Nothing |
A current offer is a curated visibility boost with no markdown at all. If you submit to one expecting a sale price, nothing will happen to your price, and that is working correctly.
A flash sale discount is real
The percentage is applied by the server, both when the price is displayed and again when the card is charged. The client never supplies a price and Helm never trusts one. So a flash sale price is genuinely what the buyer pays, unlike a compare at price which is only a claim.
Work out what the discount does to your margin before you submit. Helm's commission is charged on what the item actually sells for, so a 50% flash sale halves your revenue and does not halve your costs.
What you can submit
Your product must be live and approved, and your shop active. A draft, a pending listing or a rejected one is refused.
You can submit the same product to a given promotion once. A second attempt comes back as already submitted. There is no limit on how many different products you submit.
The limit worth knowing before you submit fifty
Only 12 items per promotion ever appear on the Shop home page, ordered by when they were approved. Being accepted into a promotion does not guarantee anybody sees you.
Nobody tells you this in the product, so plan accordingly: submitting your entire catalogue does not increase your odds much, and the twelve slots are filled by decision order rather than by merit.
Two rough edges to be aware of
The list of open promotions does not filter out ones whose window has already closed, so it is possible to submit to a flash sale that has ended. And a current offer keeps showing on the home page after its end date because its window is not checked at display time. Neither will cost you money, but neither will do what you hoped either.
Pulling out
You can withdraw your own submission at any time and it is removed immediately. If your product was in a running flash sale, withdrawing it stops the discount applying.