WooCommerce’s coupon system provides more control, convenience and flexibility when managing e-commerce sales and promotions.
While WooCommerce products can be individually set to have a sale price (the sale price can even be scheduled for a specific date range) it’s generally easier to work with coupons when managing hundreds of products.
If you’ve ever shopped online chances are that you’ve either used or been exposed to a promotional coupon code. Coupon codes allow administrators and shop managers to create a unique coupon code that can provide a: percentage discount, fixed cart discount or fixed product discount.
Additional options and restrictions are available for more control and specificity in selecting individual products or shop categories. Administrative users can also set minimum and maximum spend limits so that only only orders with a minimum dollar amount in their cart will qualify for a coupon code discount.
How to Create a WooCommerce Coupon Code
Always use a unique coupon code, and create a new coupon for every promotion. Reusing old codes, and even old coupon posts can cause issues with advanced features.
1) Add a title (coupon code) and a coupon description. The title of the coupon post is the coupon code, and you can add a description that is only displayed to administrative users in the dashboard.
It’s recommended that you use alphanumeric (letters and numbers) only for coupon codes, and that your coupon codes aren’t predictable or sequential. If your coupon code for March is march2017, and the coupon code for April is april2017, users may pay less attention to your promotional announcements and simply assume the coupon code for May is may2017.
2) Select a discount type, coupon amount and expiry date. Depending on how you want your coupon to work, you may select: percentage discount, fixed cart discount or fixed product discount. For our example we’re creating a coupon for $25 off any purchase of $100 or more, so we’ll be selecting “fixed cart discount” and setting our coupon amount to “25.00.” We’ll set the coupon to expire in 30 days, by selecting the coupon expiry date “2017-05-20”
3) Select “Usage restrictions” tab to set min/max spend, usage, products, categories, exclusions and email restrictions. For our example, we’re setting the Minimum spend to $100.00 and leaving the maximum spend empty. By selecting “Individual use only” checkbox we’re indicating that this coupon cannot be used with another coupon code. We’ll also be selecting the “Exclude sales items” checkbox so that the coupon cannot be used with on-sale products.
You can also select or exclude individual products, include or exclude specific product categories and limit coupons to specific users’ billing email addresses. The user email restriction allows you to create a single coupon for an individual user or a specific group of users ideal for customer loyalty promotions.
4) Select Usage limits tab to set coupon usage limits by coupon, product or user. It is very important to appreciate the distinction between the “Usage limit per coupon” and “Usage limit per user.” The “Usage limit per coupon” indicates the total number of times a coupon may be used, while the “Usage limit per user” indicates the number of times a single user may redeem the coupon (e.g. limit one per customer). By default, you should always set the usage limit per user to 1.
For our example, our promotion is pretty spectacular (if a user buys $100 they’ll get $25 off, effectively 25% off) so we’ll want to set “Usage limit per coupon” to 10, so that the first 10 lucky users can get a pretty “heady” discount.
Blitz Coupon Promotion
Create two separate coupon codes. The first with a higher discount and restricted usage limit per coupon, and the second with a lower discount and no usage limit per coupon.
By default, you should always set the usage limit per user to 1.
The concept here is that you’ll announce that you have a 15% off coupon for the first 5 customers, and a 10% off coupon that can be used if the 15% off coupon has already reached its maximum number of uses. This accomplishes two things: it creates urgency which will elicit a rapid response and it offers consolation. If a user has invested the time selecting products but miss their window for the 15% off coupon code, they may still use the 10% off coupon code.
Use a social media account, like Twitter or Facebook, to announce the promotion and watch as your customers race to the site to redeem their discount.
