SuiteCommerce Dynamic Promotions: Stinger & Amatheon

---

The Problem Nobody Talks About

There's a dirty secret in eCommerce that nobody likes to admit: most promotion pages are a mess.

Not because companies don't care about promotions—they do. Promotions drive traffic, move inventory, and keep customers coming back. The problem is that keeping those pages updated is a full-time job that nobody signed up for.

When Stinger first reached out to us, their marketing manager was frustrated. "Every Monday morning, I spend two hours updating our promotions page," she told us. "And then I spend another hour checking that nothing looks broken on mobile. By Wednesday, I'm already behind because someone launched a flash sale that I didn't know about."

Amatheon had a similar story, but with higher stakes. As a larger operation with multiple product lines and customer segments, they were running promotions almost continuously. Their team estimated they spent over 15 hours per week just on promotion-related CMS updates. That's almost half of someone's job, dedicated entirely to copying information from NetSuite into their website.

The worst part? Customers were noticing. Both companies had received complaints about clicking on promotions that had already expired. It's the kind of thing that erodes trust slowly, one disappointed customer at a time.

---

Why This Happens in SuiteCommerce

Here's the thing about SuiteCommerce: it's a powerful platform. NetSuite's SuitePromotions system is genuinely well-designed. You can set up complex discount rules, target specific customer groups, schedule start and end dates—all the features you'd expect from an enterprise-grade eCommerce solution.

But there's a disconnect.

The promotions live in NetSuite. The website lives in SuiteCommerce. And while they're technically part of the same ecosystem, getting promotion data to display dynamically on your website requires custom development. Out of the box, most SuiteCommerce implementations rely on static CMS pages for promotions.

That means every time you create a new promotion in NetSuite, someone has to manually recreate it on the website. Every time a promotion expires, someone has to remember to take it down. And if you want to show different promotions to different customer groups? Good luck managing that manually.

This isn't a criticism of NetSuite—it's just reality. Every enterprise platform has gaps between what's possible and what's easy. Our job is to bridge those gaps.

---

What We Built for Stinger

We started with Stinger because they had the clearer use case: a single "Current Promotions" page that needed to display whatever promotions were active in NetSuite at any given moment.

The solution sounds simple when you describe it. We built a custom SuiteCommerce extension that queries NetSuite's SuitePromotions records in real time and renders them on the frontend. But like most things in software, the devil is in the details.

First, we had to extend the SuitePromotions records themselves. NetSuite tracks all the business logic—discount percentages, eligible items, date ranges, customer groups—but it doesn't have fields for marketing content. So we added custom fields for a promotion title, description, and featured image. This let Stinger's marketing team control how each promotion appeared on the website without touching any code.

Then we built the connection layer. Using RESTlet APIs and carefully configured fieldsets, we created an endpoint that returns only the data the frontend needs. This matters for performance. SuitePromotions records can contain a lot of information, and you don't want your promotions page making heavy API calls every time a customer loads it.

One thing we underestimated was how much the customer eligibility logic would complicate things. NetSuite's promotion rules can get complex—specific customer groups, minimum order amounts, date ranges that overlap. Our first version worked great for simple promotions but choked on edge cases. We spent an extra few days refactoring that logic to handle the full range of scenarios Stinger actually used. It's the kind of thing you don't see in the requirements doc but discover when real data hits real code.

The frontend component handles the display logic. It checks the current date against each promotion's start and end dates, filters by customer eligibility (if the customer is logged in), and renders everything in a responsive grid. We also added links to each promoted product's detail page, so customers can go directly from seeing a deal to adding it to their cart.

The whole project took about four weeks from kickoff to production deployment. By the end, Stinger's marketing team was no longer spending their Monday mornings on manual updates. Promotions they set up in NetSuite appeared on the website automatically, and expired promotions disappeared without anyone having to remember to remove them.

"The ROI was clear within the first month," their marketing manager told us later. "No more expired promotions embarrassing us in front of customers, and our team can focus on strategy instead of manual updates."

---

Taking It Further with Amatheon

When Amatheon came to us with a similar request, we knew the core solution worked. But their requirements pushed us to think bigger.

Amatheon didn't just want a single promotions page. They wanted to be able to feature specific promotions on specific pages throughout their site. A seasonal sale might appear on the homepage, while a clearance event might only show on a dedicated landing page. And they wanted their marketing team to control all of this without involving developers.

We added a new custom field to SuitePromotions: "CMS URL Page." This simple addition changed everything. Now, when Amatheon's team creates a promotion in NetSuite, they can specify exactly where it should appear on the website. Enter "/home" and it shows on the homepage. Enter "/seasonal-sale" and it shows on that landing page. Leave it blank and it shows on the default promotions page.

We also built in fallback behavior. What happens when there are no active promotions to display? A blank page looks broken. So we gave Amatheon the ability to configure a "fallback mode" in NetSuite. When no promotions are active, the page automatically displays best-selling products instead. The customer never sees an empty page, and the marketing team never has to think about it.

The add-to-cart integration was Amatheon's idea. During our discovery phase, they mentioned that customers often found promotions interesting but then got lost navigating to the actual products. We added the ability to add promoted items directly to the cart from the promotions page, reducing the steps between "that looks interesting" and "I'm buying this."

What impressed us most was how quickly Amatheon's team took ownership of the system. Within a week of launch, they were running experiments—featuring different promotions on different pages, testing which placements drove the most engagement. They didn't need us for any of it.

"BrokenRubik didn't just solve our immediate problem," their Operations Director told us. "They gave us a system that scales with our business. Our marketing team now launches promotions in minutes instead of days."

That's the real measure of a good solution: when the client forgets they ever needed help.

---

The Technical Reality

For the developers and technical evaluators reading this, here's what's actually running under the hood.

The extension is built on SuiteScript 2.0 for the backend logic, with RESTlet APIs handling the data transfer between NetSuite and SuiteCommerce. We use Handlebars templates for the frontend rendering and SCSS for styling that integrates with each client's existing theme.

Performance was a priority throughout. We implemented fieldsets to minimize the data payload on each API call—a change that reduced API response times by about 60% compared to pulling full SuitePromotions records. Static assets are CDN-cached, and images are lazy-loaded so the initial page render isn't blocked by heavy promotional graphics.

The architecture is modular by design. The same core extension runs on both Stinger and Amatheon's sites, with configuration differences handled through NetSuite custom fields rather than code changes. This means we can deploy to new SuiteCommerce clients relatively quickly, and improvements we make for one client can benefit others.

Currently, the system supports Item Promotions and Fixed Price Item Promotions. We designed it to be extensible to other promotion types—Order Promotions, Shipping Promotions, Free Gift Promotions—when clients need them.

---

What Changed for These Businesses

The obvious wins are easy to measure. Stinger's marketing team got back their Monday mornings. Amatheon's 15+ hours of weekly CMS work dropped to zero. Neither company has shown an expired promotion to a customer since the system went live.

But the more interesting changes are harder to quantify.

Amatheon's marketing team started running more promotions. When launching a promotion used to take hours of coordination, they stuck to big seasonal events. Now that promotions are automatic, they experiment with flash sales, customer-specific offers, and time-limited deals. The friction is gone, so the creativity flows.

Stinger's team talks about trust differently now. "When a customer clicks on a promotion, it works," their marketing manager told us. "It seems like a small thing, but it matters. Every time a customer clicked on an expired offer, we were training them not to trust us. Now that's just not a problem anymore."

Both companies mentioned something we didn't expect: the relationship between marketing and IT improved. When every promotion required developer time, there was inherent tension. Marketing wanted speed; IT wanted to manage their workload. Now that marketing owns the promotion workflow end-to-end, that source of friction is gone.

---

Is This Right for Your Business?

Not every SuiteCommerce site needs dynamic promotions. If you run one or two major sales per year and your current process works fine, the investment probably doesn't make sense.

But if you recognize yourself in Stinger or Amatheon's story—if you're spending hours on manual CMS updates, if customers have complained about expired offers, if your marketing team feels constrained by how long it takes to launch promotions—then we should talk.

The solution works with SuiteCommerce Advanced, SuiteCommerce Standard, and SuiteCommerce InStore. Implementation typically takes four weeks. And we're happy to do a free 30-minute assessment to see if it makes sense for your situation.

We've seen what happens when marketing teams get their time back. They stop managing content and start running experiments. They stop playing defense and start driving revenue. If that sounds like what you need, let's figure out if we're the right fit.