Promotion Management, Reimagined: 

Extenda Retail’s Next-Gen Promotion Engine and why it is a game changer

Promotions are the heartbeat of retail. They bring shoppers through the door, clear overstocks, fuel brand love, and turn first-timers into loyal regulars. But “promotion” can mean many things in a store or an e-commerce funnel:

• A temporary discount (“3 for 2”, “-20% this weekend”)
• A marketing campaign with extra exposure in-store and online
• A loyalty boost (“double points on fresh produce this week”)
• Strategic product placement (front-of-shelf, end caps, store-opening deals)

At Extenda Retail, we define a promotion as any discount or benefit not manually applied by a cashier. Promotions can originate from many places - ERP price rules, B2B CRM price lists, loyalty platforms, HR staff perks, product lifecycle/seasonal markdowns, or local establishment teams running store-opening events. The reality for modern retailers is that promotion logic is everywhere—and customers expect it to “just work” across channels and touchpoints.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Extenda Retail’s soon to be launched next-generation Promotion Engine —a highly scalable, configurable, and AI-ready solution designed to make promotions effortless to manage, predictable to execute, and powerful for growth.

Why Promotions Matter (More Than Ever)

• Traffic & conversion: Timely offers get shoppers in and help them decide.
• Supplier collaboration: Funded deals can “move the hand” on brand preference.
• Inventory health: Clear overstock before expiry; move seasonal assortments with precision.
• Customer lifetime value: Reward loyalty, increase basket size, and bring customers back.
• Moments that matter: From Black Friday to local store events, promotions create buzz—if your systems can keep up.

The catch? Promotions grow complex as you scale channels, brands, and markets. Rules conflict. Exceptions multiply. “Best deal” isn’t always “the right deal.” And testing edge cases 

Introducing: The New Hii Retail Promotion Engine

The core of the new Promotion Engine:

1) Best Deal—done the right way (and configurable when it shouldn’t be “best”)
Many retailers want the best-possible outcome for the shopper; others need nuanced strategies by source or type. Our engine supports proper best deal out of the box, plus configurable conflict strategies so you can define how promotions interact—globally or per type.

2) Conflict strategies you control
Not all promotions should stack. Sometimes one must run before another, or even disqualify others regardless of value. We let you define promotion types and set the relationship matrix between them: best-deal, accumulate & order (before/after), or disqualify. This reduces onboarding friction and reflects how your business really works.

3) Return/refund re-evaluation
We recalculate benefits on returns and refunds so the outcome remains fair, transparent, and auditable—for customers and finance teams alike.

4) Predictable logic, better maintainability
Clear, well-documented evaluation paths make results intuitive for store teams and support. Our reference-grade documentation and clean architecture keep operations smooth and onboarding fast.

5) Built to scale & to decouple
Designed as a loosely-coupled service that can power varied use cases—POS, self-checkout, e-commerce, staff apps—without hardwiring business logic. It’s highly scalable for peak events and portable for edge use.

6) “What you’re missing” loyalty insights
Show customers the value of membership with theoretical loyalty calculation—e.g., “Join now to save €8 on this basket”—to boost acquisition and activation.

Deployment that Fits Your Needs

• Cloud at scale (GCP): Spin up for peak events like Black Friday with elastic capacity for e-commerce and omnichannel surges.
• Edge for resilience: Run locally in store for high availability and near-zero latency—even if your connection drops.
• Hybrid: Use the right mix per market, format, or channel.

Configurations You Can Actually Use

We learned from leading retailers (e.g., across grocery, DIY, fashion) that there’s no universal rulebook for promotion behavior. So we made the rulebook yours:

• Define your promotion types (by issuer/source or business logic).
• Configure conflict strategies between types (best-deal, accumulate with order, disqualify).
• Tailor the admin UI per tenant/vertical—surface only the conditions and attributes you use and need in your business.
• Target the right products - through flexible item filters based on a wide range of attributes
• Create reusable test transactions to validate rules before they go live.

Why it is different and groundbreaking: 

Try Before You Go Live: The Promotion Playground

This is a game-changer for speed and confidence. The Promotion Playground lets you simulate:

• A new promotion against a date-filtered set of existing promotions using a predefined test basket.
• A new conflict resolution matrix against your live catalog of promotions—again using test transactions.

Instant feedback. No surprises. Safer experiments. Faster approvals.

AI-Powered Nudging & Natural-Language Creation

Nudge Engine for Upsell Moments
Customers often land just shy of a deal. Historically, capturing those moments required brittle, manual rules. Our AI-assisted approach can monitor baskets in real time and identify when the shopper is close to triggering a benefit, then:

• Nudge associates on attended lanes (“They’re one item away from ‘3 for 2’ on Pepsi.”)
• Notify shoppers directly on customer displays and SCO terminals (“Add 1 more pack to get one free.”)

Examples:

• “You’ve scanned 2 cans of Pepsi. There’s a buy-3-get-1-free—add one more to qualify.”
• “Add another pair of Adidas tube socks to get 50% off any Adidas white T-shirt.”

Natural-Language Promotion Creation
Skip the maze of forms. Describe your intent and let the system propose the configuration:
“Create a seasonal promotion for all berries, 3 for 2, cheapest for free, for the next two weeks, my local store only.”
The engine translates that into a structured promotion you can review, tweak, and publish.

What This Means for Your Teams

• Merchandising: Design complex campaigns without wrestling with rule collisions.
• Store Operations: Predictable, explainable outcomes—less confusion at checkout.
• Marketing & Loyalty: Seamless funded offers, targeted benefits, and “join now” value prompts.
• IT & Architecture: Cloud/edge flexibility, clean APIs, and documentation your engineers will thank you for.
• Finance & Compliance: Transparent calculations, consistent returns processing, and audit-friendly logic.

Feature Snapshot

• Loosely coupled architecture to power POS, SCO, and e-com from one core.
• GCP scaling for peak traffic & edge deployment for in-store resilience.
• Natural-language creation of promotions.
• Promotion Playground to simulate before publishing.
• Proper best-deal with configurable conflict strategies (best/accumulate/disqualify & ordering).
• AI-powered nudges at POS, SCO, and customer displays.
• Loyalty “what you’re missing” indicators to drive sign-ups.
• Return/refund re-evaluation for fair, auditable outcomes.
• Reference-grade docs, predictable logic, and clean admin.

Ready to Make Promotions a Growth Engine?

With Extenda Retail’s next-gen Hii Retail Promotion Engine, you get the flexibility to mirror your real-world business rules, the confidence to test before you launch, and the intelligence to capture upsell moments in real time—across every channel.

Let’s turn promotions into predictable profit.
Want a demo or sandbox access to the Promotion Playground? Get in touch and we’ll show you how quickly you can design, test, and deploy your next campaign.