WooCommerce is the most popular online store plugin for WordPress with more the 5 million active installations. You can create physical or digital store with WooCommerce and showcase items with product pages. Most of the commercial themes available in WordPress marketplaces offer beautiful store and product pages. You can make use of this setup to host your online store without hassle. However, when it comes to selling you need to offer coupons and promote the products for attracting your customers. In this article, we will explain how to create coupons in WooCommerce with default setup and tips for product promotion.
Use and Types of Coupons
Users can easily find thousands of similar products when searching online. Even your product page is on top of the search results, or you reach users through advertising, it does not mean users landing on your product page will actually buy the item. You need to offer something special to convert the visitor into customer and also retain them for long term. You can achieve this by creating different types of coupons in WooCommerce.
- Per product – offer price or percentage discount on a specific product.
- Per cart – offer discount on total cart amount.
You can use the coupons in different ways and here is one example case we normally use to encourage users buying bundles instead of single product.
- Let’s say you have 5 products each with $5 price.
- You want to offer 10% discount coupon only when users buy all these 5 products.
- In this case, create a new product page and add all 5 products as variations with $5 per product as a price.
- Now, create a 10% coupon with fixed cart amount with a minimum spend as $25.
- User can enter the coupon code when purchasing the bundle and get 10% off for the final price of $22.5. The discount can’t be applied when purchasing individual products as the minimum spend will not be equal to $25.
This is just a one scenario, and you can apply varieties of restrictions to promote specific product in your store.
Create Coupons in WooCommerce
We assume you are already using WooCommerce plugin in your site with product pages. In this case, go to “Marketing > Coupons” menu in your WordPress admin panel. Here you will see all existing coupons on your site and click on “Add coupon” button to create a new one.
- Enter your coupon code in the title box. If you do not know what to enter, simply click on the “Generate coupon code” button” so that WooCommerce plugin will automatically generate a code and fill the title box.
- Enter title to explain your coupon. This is an optional step, but we recommend providing a description so that you can easily understand the purpose of the coupon when viewing from the coupon list page.
Coupon data section has three tabs to add validity and define the type of discount.
General Coupon Data
- Discount type – you will have three options to select here – percentage discount, fixed cart discount and fixed product discount.
- Coupon amount – enter the amount you want to offer as a discount. Remember, what you enter here will be a percentage for percentage discount and price discount for other two types.
- Allow free shipping – if you offer free shipping for delivering physical products, then enable this check box. As showing in the instructions, you must setup free shipping method in your shipping zone which requires a coupon. For a digital product, you can leave this box unchecked.
- Coupon expiry date – select the date for the coupon to expire automatically. You can anytime reset the date to extend the validity of the same coupon code.
Usage restriction
This is important section where you need to apply the usage restriction for applying the coupon.
- Minimum spend – coupon will be valid only if the cart total is equal to the amount you enter here.
- Maximum spend – same as minimum spend while the coupon will be applicable for the maximum spend amount. You can always leave this field empty indicating no maximum spend limit.
- Individual use only – enable this to use the coupon independently without combining with any other coupons.
- Exclude sale items – enable this to make the coupon invalid if there is a sale item in the cart.
- Products – select the product that you want to offer a discount, leave it blank if you want to offer a coupon for all products or on cart total.
- Exclude products – select products to exclude from the discount when used with cart total.
- Product categories and Exclude categories – same as products and exclude products you can do for category level.
- Allowed emails – enter any email address which should be used as a billing email for the coupon to work. You can enter multiple email addresses separated with comma and use wildcard like *@gmail.com. We recommend using this with specific email address when you want to offer a coupon to one of your special customers.
Usage Limit
You can restrict the number of times to use your coupons based on two criteria:
- Usage limit per coupon – enter a number here to restrict the maximum number of times the coupon can be applied.
- Usage limit per user – enter the number to restrict the usage limit per customer basis. If you allow guest checkout, this option will use the billing email to valid the limit. For logged in checkout, it will use the customer account ID.
That’s All!!! You have filled all the details and click “Publish” button to make your coupon live.
Promoting Your Products with Coupons
The problem is that your customers and users will not know there are special coupons available for purchasing your product. This will be unfortunate if a customer landing on your product page does not know there is a discount available. There are few options to showcase your coupons and you need to use them to make sure your coupons of used by customers:
- Share the coupons on social media along with your product page.
- If you have only one coupon, showcase it in the site wide store notice or use a notification plugin to show it on the top of your site.
- Showcase your coupons in the footer or below product description of on the sidebar.
- Create a separate coupon page and display all your coupons so that users can bookmark your page and get discounts.
- Send discount coupon through emails and push notifications to reach out customers.
- It is also a good idea to add the discount price or percentage in the product title like “Awesome Product with 30% Off”. Since the product page is indexed and shown in search results, it can increase the possibilities of conversion.
Unfortunately, WooCommerce coupons are not shown in XML Sitemap as separate content type. This means, coupons will not be showing in Google search results, and you have to manually promote to reach your customers.
Additional Coupon Plugins for WooCommerce
Go to “Marketing > Coupons” page and scroll down to bottom. Here you can find the recommended add-ons for your coupons. You can have personalized coupons for customers, store credit, give away, etc. with these add-ons. However, these are premium extensions that you need to purchase from the WooCommerce website.
Applying Coupon During Checkout
Now that you have created a coupon and send to customers. WooCommerce plugin will show an option to enter coupon on the checkout page. The appearance of the checkout page change if your theme offers any custom templates. Generally, you will see an option saying “Apply Coupon” like below.
Upon entering a correct coupon, you will see a success message saying, “Coupon applied successfully” and the price will be reduced accordingly.
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