Create a Coupon Code in WooCommerce

In this tutorial we will be setting up coupons. Coupons can be a great incentive to get people attending your breakout sessions, onsite presentations, or invitationals to go to your website and purchase products. I’m sure you can think of other ways to use coupons as well. WooCommerce makes it easy to create new and advanced coupons, and also manage existing coupons.

If you want more information than what is in this tutorial, read this tutorial on this site:
https://www.flycart.org/blog/wordpress/how-to-create-coupons-in-woocommerce

Login to the backend or admin panel of your site.

On the left Menu, point to Marketing. If you see Coupons in the fly-out menu then Coupons are activated on your site. If you don’t see Coupons go to WooCommerce>Settings >Check the box beside Enable the Use of Coupons. Be sure to Save the page.

Step 1

To create a new coupon, go to Marketing>Coupons>Add Coupon. As you can see, the new coupon page looks a lot like a new page, new post page, and new product page, because a coupon is just a custom post inside WordPress.

This means it behaves much like a custom page or post; you can enter your title, you can go in and change it at any time, you can save it, you can put in a trash bin, and you can restore it if you trashed it by mistake.

Let’s set up a new coupon. Give the coupon a brief code, like tcea, to represent the conference where you are presenting a breakout session.  Do not click on Generate Code.

Setting a description for the coupon is just for your purposes, so you remember what this coupon is for. For example, if it’s a coupon that gives a discount on a certain product at a certain time, describe it here, so that when you look at it later, you’ll know exactly what this coupon is.

Step 2

Go to Coupon Data on the left and click on General

Discount Type:
Now choose what type of coupon this is. It can be a Percentage discount, Fixed cart discount or Fixed product discount.

• Percentage discount – percentage discount on all items in a cart or choose products to include or exclude
• Fixed cart discount – flat dollar amount discount on all items in a cart
• Fixed product discount – flat dollar amount discount on a specific product or service

 Coupon Amount:
When you choose one of the options above, set the coupon amount either in a monetary value, or in a percentage value, depending on what you want. You don’t put $ or % symbols. Check each of out in your cart to see what they do.

Allow Free Shipping:
Most of you are already offering Free Shipping, so checking this wouldn’t be necessary. You would only use this if you have Enabled Shipping at WooCommerce>Shipping and weren’t already using Free Shipping.

 Coupon Expiry Date:
Next is the Expiry date. Always set an expiry date for any coupon.  Coupons are more effective when they are targeted for a specific time period, or when they’re limited in quantity, or both, because that will give people incentive to buy products right now, because they have to, otherwise the coupon will disappear.  Maybe you want your coupon to expire 2-3 days after you present to give participants incentive to go to your website quickly, before they forget. Length of time for the coupon is up to you but be sure to let customers know when the coupon ends.

Step 3

On the left click Usage Restrictions. Point to the question mark at the end of each field to see a description of each item in Usage Restrictions.

Minimum Spend:
You can set a minimum amount meaning the coupon will only work if people are buying more than a certain amount of money that you set.

Maximum Spend:
You can also enter a maximum subtotal when using the coupon.

Individual Use Only:
This determines whether this coupon can be used in combination with other coupons. You need to be very careful about this, because if you don’t check it, and you have a lot of coupons in circulation, then some smart people may figure out a way of applying multiple different coupons on top of one another to get maybe free shipping, plus a discount, plus another discount, plus another discount.

So, unless you are planning to allow people to do that, to stack their coupons, you may want to check this, so that you don’t have a situation where you end up giving products away almost for free.

Exclude Sale Items:
Check this is you don’t want to include items you already have on sale.

Products, Exclude Products, Categories, Exclude Categories:
Click inside each field and you see it prompts you to enter 3 letters of the name of the product or category, then you can choose the product or category you want to include or exclude.

You can apply coupons either to specific products, you can also exclude products from this coupon, or you can either apply to specific categories, or exclude specific categories.

So, you can go on and say this coupon is only available for this specific product, and this specific product category. So, you can say, maybe, the Teach-To book, plus all the DI books, are on sale with this coupon. Or you can say everything in the store is on sale with this coupon, except for Teachin’ the Blues Away CD. You can use this to create highly targeted coupons. So, if you know that there’s a person or a group of people that are very interested in a specific product, you can create a custom coupon just for them, that targets just that specific product for a certain amount of time, and then they can use that coupon to get that specific product.

Email Restrictions:
You will not use this one.

Step 4

On the left click Usage Limits. Point to the question mark at the end of each field to see a description of each item in Usage Limits.

Usage Limit Per Coupon:
This sets how many times the coupon can be used. This would be good to set if you wanted the first 10 people who go to your site and and buy something to get the coupon discount…then the coupon no longer works. This would create an urgency to buy.

Limit Usage to X Items and Usage Limit Per User:
I would leave these as unlimited.