Supporting Incentives at multiple levels on automotive OEM website

Incentives, or special offers, are often published by automotive brands, aka OEMs.The incentives are aimed at reducing the price of a model by reducing purchase or lease prices.There are different types of incentives such as Finance, Lease or Bonus.Also, the incentives could be offered at different levels such as national, regional or dealer level.However, only the most attractive incentives for a particular model should be displayed at the OEM website.How to support such multi-levels and various types of incentives is a common challenge facing many OEM website development teams.Different OEMs have different solutions to the issue.There is no right or wrong way to solve it.I would like to share how we approached it during MazdaUSA.com website development.

To find a solution, we first analyzed the organization of the incentives at all levels.We found that they share a common structure.That is each incentive is specific for a model/model year and for one incentive type such as Finance, Lease or Bonus.This makes it easy to find the corresponding incentive at a different level, for example at the dealer level.Also, we discovered that the incentive gets sweeter and more attractive when the covering geographic area gets smaller.In other words, incentives got better at the dealer than the regional, and regional than at the national level.One final note is that an OEM website needs to show all incentives available at the national level.

With this understanding, we came up with a layered approach for building the final set of incentives.Imagine you have a stack of paper, and each paper represents a set of incentives at a level.You stack the papers from the smallest to the largest geographic coverage area.In our case, the dealer incentives are on the top, the regional in the middle, and the national at the bottom.Further image that the pagers are transparent.When you look down the stack, you would see all the same types of incentives are stacked, if there are multiple incentives.Last, we would pick all the incentives shown on the top most layer.For example, if there is no 36-month lease incentive for 2023 Model A at the dealer level, but there is one at the regional level, then the regional level lease incentive is picked even though there is the same type of incentive at the national level.This is because of the reason stated in the previous paragraph.

To program the above logic, we built a collection of incentives for each level and layered the collections like a stack of papers.Using the national incentive collection as a base, the logic walks through all incentives in the collection and checks if there is the same type of incentive for each model and model year at the next collection.If found, the incentive replaces the one in the national collection.The process goes through all collections in an order.When done, the final collection is built and ready to be sent to the UI for displaying.

The above approach was designed for MazdaUSA.com. It by no means is portable to other OEM.We see a couple issues.First, incentives at different levels could not be combined.For example, if a dealer offers an additional $500 discount towards finding a purchase over the national $1,000 discount.Our approach assumes that the dealer's incentive already combined the incentives.Second, the logic above seems to restrict the search of incentive to incentive type, model and model year.What happens when you have incentives at trim even drivetrain level?The ease fix is to build a search key with more elements.In this case, the key will include incentive type, model, year, trim, and drivetrain.We love to hear your comments and welcome feedback and discussion.