Intro
A coupon is a free, discounted, or retail discount applied to a driver or token. Coupons can be in the form of various units such as money, sessions, % discounts or meter value. When the coupon value reaches zero, the token it was applied to will return to the regular retail cost (exception here for meter-value-based coupons, as detailed later). The application of a coupon occurs at the driver level, hence, if a driver possesses an RFID, the coupon is automatically applied. Coupons may also be targeted towards a certain CPO (internal only), meaning they are targeted for a specific CPO and can only be used by certain drivers.
In this coupon's feature, it is currently out of scope to show the available coupons, status and/or balances in EvPortal. The customer needs as such to rely on its own CRM system for instance to manage this information. It is in the medium/long term roadmap to make this improvement.
Types of Coupons & Properties
- Meter Value Coupons: Free charge is granted for the first X minutes of every applicable charging session.
- Money coupon: Discount on the retail cost.
- Discount coupon: A % based discount is applied to the retail cost.
- Session Coupons: A coupon for a free session.
Note: Our customers can create coupons or fetch coupon balance using Greenflux APIs.
Customer Information regarding Coupons:
- General Characteristics
- Unique Identifier: Each coupon possesses a globally unique identifier.
- Creation and Usage: Coupons can be created at any time. If a coupon is created for a driver during their charging session, the coupon may already be applied to the running session. It is not recommended to create a coupon exactly at the end of the session to avoid datetime precision problems.
- Expiration: Coupons created during a session remain valid for future sessions until they expire. Coupons expire based on their specified expiration date.
- Coupon Application Order: Coupons are applied in a specific order:
- Meter-value-based coupons.
- Session Coupon
- Discount coupons (only the highest one is used if there are many).
- Money coupons (consumed in order of expiration).
Coupon Handling:
- GreenFlux always considers all active coupons when looking for coupons to apply.
- It is not possible to avoid using coupons altogether or skip specific coupons.
- Coupons cannot be changed or canceled via the API.
- When there are several tokens under a certain driver, the coupon will be used in chronological order, i.e. if token no. 3 is the first to be used, then coupon(s) will be used for that session with token 3
Coupon Types and Characteristics
- Balance Characteristics:
- The balance of each individual coupon is considered in order of expiration.
- Coupon balance cannot become negative.
- If the coupon balance covers the entire retail cost, the after-coupon retail cost is zero.
- Meter-Value-Based Coupons (MVB-Coupons)
- Behavior:
- MVB-Coupons grant free charging for the first X minutes of every applicable charging session until the coupon expires.
- Similar to discount coupons, nothing is deducted from the coupon itself.
- Meter-Value Considerations:
- Clock-aligned meter-values are necessary for MVB-Coupons,
- Time-of-Use Billing:
- MVB-Coupons require Time-of-Use (ToU) billing to be enabled on chargers - check configuration steps in this article to know how to implement: Time of Use Tariff (greenflux.com))
- API endpoint: POST a meter value coupon (greenflux.com)
Meter - value based coupon: Be aware that not all charge station support clock aligned meter values, thus this is a coupon type that you need to carefully assess its usage. GreenFlux advice extensive ACCeptance testing prior to production deployment of this coupon type. Check the last dedicated section on this article for further considerations on implementing these coupons
- Money Coupon
- Characteristics:
- Money coupons provide a discount on the retail (driver) cost.
- Can be used until the specified expiration date.
- API endpoint: POST a money coupon (greenflux.com)
- Discount Coupon
- Characteristics:
- Percentage-based money discount on retail cost.
- Can be used until the specified expiration date.
- API endpoint: POST a percentage discount coupon (greenflux.com)
- Session Coupon:
- Characteristics:
- full session(s) will be granted for free, provided the coupon is within the expiry date and there is still sessions remaining in the balance
- API endpoint: POST a session coupon (greenflux.com)
Note: To understand creation of coupons or ways to fetch balance, please look at our dev portal - Get Coupon by Coupon ID (greenflux.com)
Coupon Information in the CDR.
- coupon_usage
- ▪ The coupon_usage property is an array that captures detailed information about each coupon used during the charging session. The structure of the CouponUsage type includes information such as:
- ▪ Coupon ID
- ▪ Coupon type (e.g., meter-value-based, discount, money)
- ▪ Coupon amount or value applied
- ▪ Expiry status of the coupon
- coupons_compensated_costs
- ▪ The coupons_compensated_costs property represents the total monetary value of coupons redeemed during the charging session. This provides a consolidated view of the cost savings achieved through coupon usage.
Future considerations / out of scope / not suppported:
1. EV Portal Integration ◦ Capabilities: To be supported in future phases. 1. EV Portal allows changes to coupons: 2. Increase or decrease balance. 3. Change expiration date. 4. Both options can be used to deactivate a coupon. 2. Inter-CPO Coupon Sharing: Coupons shared between different CPOs
- EV Portal Integration
- ◦ Capabilities: To be supported in future phases.
- EV Portal allows changes to coupons:
- Increase or decrease balance.
- Change expiration date.
- Both options can be used to deactivate a coupon.
- Inter-CPO Coupon Sharing: Coupons shared between different CPOs
Advanced working principles of Meter-Value-Based Coupons
As defined above, these coupon type requires quite advanced configurations in place. Let us look at the following requirement "Clock-aligned meter-values are necessary for MVB-Coupons":
- This is as aspect you can only control on your own chargers and some don't even support this. Thus a user with this coupon type may not be able to use whenever chargers don't have these configurations in place. E.g. when users go to roaming chargers, they (most likely) won't be able to use these coupons, meaning this coupon type won't be applied to those sessions.
- Having clock aligned meter values means that the charger send meter values every 15 minutes, aligned with 00:00:00 time stamp (this is the definition of clock aligned meter values).
- Considering all the required configurations for a meter value based coupon, the following condition defined the applicability of a coupon:
- A meter value based coupon is applied to all the segments within a session that a meter value is received, and provided the combined duration of those segments is lower or equal to the meter value Duration + Tolerance combined.
- Let us check an example:
- Pre-conditions:
- a certain driver was issued a meter value based coupon with the following characteristics:
- duration = 25 minutes
- tolerance = 1 minute
- there is a session from a token from that driver in a charger with all required configurations in place
- Example:
- Session took 35 minutes, as follows:
- Start at 15:08:00
- clock aligned meter value received at 15:15:00
- clock aligned meter value received at 15:30:00
- Stop at 15:43:00
- From that we obtain the session's several segments:
- Segment 1: 15:08:00 --> 15:15:00 (duration = 7 min; cumulated duration = 7 min <= duration + tolerance)
- Segment 2: 15:15:00 --> 15:30:00 (duration = 15 min; cumulated duration = 22 min <= duration + tolerance)
- Segment 3: 15:30:00 --> 15:43:00 (duration = 13 min; cumulated duration = 35 min > duration + tolerance)
- From the above, we get that segment 1 and 2 are included in free charging, meaning 22 minutes of free charging and the remaining are calculated as per the retail cost.