A coupon in an e-commerce store is a special code or discount that customers can apply at checkout to get a price reduction, free shipping, or other perks. It’s a powerful tool for boosting sales, attracting new customers, and encouraging repeat purchases.
Coupons create urgency, making shoppers more likely to complete their orders instead of abandoning their carts. They also help clear out old stock and reward loyal buyers, keeping them engaged with the brand.
Let’s start by creating your first coupon. To do that, head over to the menu item labeled as “Coupons” within the left sidebar of your dashboard. Wait for the screen to load.
From this screen, you can create coupons and manage each coupon you have created in the past. Let’s click on “Add new coupon” to get started.
Add a New Coupon
The first thing that you need to add is the coupon code, which your customers will use to claim their discount or gift. If you offer a discount of 10%, then you can call it something like discount10.
Let’s add the name of the code. Under the code, you can add a description. Your customers will not see the description so only you can see it. It is best used to describe what the coupon does for administration purposes. For now, we are going to leave it open.
We are going to go through the general tab under coupon data.
General
You have up to three discount types that you can apply to the code, which include a percentage discount that will give your customers 10% off all purchases made on your store if you add the value 10 to the coupon amount.
The fixed cart discount will allow you to give your customers a fixed amount that they can deduct from their total cart value. If you add 100, then it will give them R100 or $100 off, depending on the currency that you use.
The fixed product discount option allows you to set the coupon to only apply to specific products in your store. This method will apply a discount of a fixed amount that will be subtracted from the cart value.
For this example, we are going to select the percentage discount option, and under coupon amount, we are going to add the value 1,0 equating to 10%. You also have the option to allow free shipping whenever this coupon is applied. For this to work, you need to have already set up your free shipping options under woocommerce settings.
If you plan for the coupon to expire, then you can add an expiry date to it. An expiry date on a coupon creates urgency, pushing customers to make a purchase before the deal disappears. This sense of urgency taps into the fear of missing out (FOMO), encouraging faster decision-making and reducing cart abandonment.
Next, we are going to cover usage restrictions.
Usage Restriction
The usage restriction section allows you to restrict the coupon based on the amount the customer is willing to spend and on products. First, you will notice that you can add a minimum and a maximum spend based on the cart subtotal. In most cases, you would want to add a minimum spend that you feel comfortable with to optimize your profit.
You can also enable the option labeled “Individual use only” which will prevent coupon stacking so that only one coupon can be used. You also have the option to disable the coupon on products that are on sale because you are already giving a discount on those products.
Next, you can select the products that you want to include or exclude, for whether you want the coupon to be applied to them or not. The same can be done for the product categories and brands. You can also set which emails or prefixes of emails you want to include.
Next, we are going to go over the usage limits.
Usage Limits
Under usage limits, you can set the usage limit for the coupon. If you add the value 20, then that means the coupon can only be used 20 times. You can also limit the coupon to a maximum number of items in the cart. Let’s say your limit is 5 and there are 7 products in the cart.
The coupon will then only be applied to the first 5 products in the cart. You can also set a usage limit per customer. If you add the value 1, then the coupon can only be used once per customer according to their billing email and user ID.
Once you are finished, you need to click on the blue publish button for the coupon to go live.
Testing the Coupon
Now that the coupon is live, let’s test and see how it is going to work in practice. First, we need to add some products to the cart and then go to the cart page. Let’s go through this process.
Once you are on the cart page, you will notice that there is a coupon field under the products where your customer can add the coupon code that you provided for them. We create a coupon that is going to give your customers 10 percent off all purchases within their cart.
Let’s add the coupon to see what will happen to the cart subtotal once added. Once you have added the coupon, you need to click on the “apply coupon” button for it to take effect. Notice how the subtotal has subtracted the value that you specified for the coupon code.
We hope you found this tutorial on coupon codes useful.