How to add a coupon in Woocommerce (eg: 20% Discount)

Today we are going to show you how to add a coupon in Woocommerce. Coupons are a great way to reward new customers, entice new ones, mark a special occasion and many other things. The choice is unlimited and entirely reliant on your own business’ style.

Woocommerce is an extremely versatile shopping cart solution for websites and is the one that we recoommend to most of our clients (the others have something purpose-built for them when Woocommerce is way too big for their needs or skill levels).

First of all – please note that this tutorial only applies if you have Woocommerce installed on your website. If you haven’t, then this article is no use to you whatsoever. 

How to add a new coupon in Woocommerce

Woocommerce has its own free coupon addon available. Once Woo is installed, it will automatically appear under the “Marketing subheading in the left-hand sidebar. Here’s how to add a new coupin in there. 

You can click the images to view them larger (and click the little X to make them disappear again).

Here we go…

  • Log into the back end of your website as normal.
  • Hover over “Marketing” in the left sidebar then click on “Coupons” when it appears.
  • Once it has loaded, click on “Add coupon” at the top of your screen.

In the “Coupon Code” box add a code that you can give to your customers. This is the code they will type/paste into their shopping cart. For example: APRIL20 might be suitable for a code that gives your customers 20% off their orders in April. Name it sensibly, and try to keep it all in upper case letters just like most other sellers do.

In “Description” add an optional description to explain exactly what the code is for. So, with the above example, you might write “20% off orders for all customers”. Customers don’t see this description, but by keeping it concise and accurate, other team members will know what it is. 

Below these fields, you’ll see the Coupon data block which has three sections:

  1. General
  2. Usage restriction
  3. Usage limits

General

Discount Type: There are three choices here. You can choose the tpype of discount you wish to apply. In the above example, we would select “Percentage Discount”. You will know which applies to your own discount. Choose which suits you best.

By default, WooCommerce provides three discount types:

  • Percentage discounts apply a percentage discount to the entire cart.
  • Fixed cart discounts apply a fixed amount discount to the entire cart.
  • Fixed product discounts apply a fixed amount discount to selected products only. The discount is calculated per item and not for the whole cart.

Set your chosen amount in the Coupon Amount field. So in this example it would be “20”.

You can also omit that amount and/or add Free shipping

If you want an expiry date, you can add that here too.

In our example, we’ve added a 20% discount with no free shipping and it expires at the end of March.

Usage Restriction

If you don’t change any of these settings, then anyone and everyone can use your new coupon as often as they like.  That may suit you perfectly – but do look through the settings to see if anything matches your needs. 

You can apply several different restrictions to your coupon:

  • Set a minimum or maximum order subtotal. This is definitely worth a look!!
  • Include or exclude selected products or categories. This is great when trying to promote a specific product or category on your site
  • Limit by ‘allowed’ emails (verified against billing email the customer enters when purchasing). This is perfect for if you want to offer a specific coupon to one person. 
    – However, since the launch of WooCommerce 3.4+ you can also include a wildcard asterisk to match multiple email addresses, for example, *@gandy-draper.com would make any Gandy-Draper email address a beneficiary of this code.

Usage Limits

This section is really useful. Here you can set some boundaries to your coupon. 

You can decide how many times the coupon can be used by a customer or in total and even the number of products.

In our example, you’ll see that we’ve specified that the coupon once by customer, and by 500 customers altogether.

You’ve almost completed “how to add a coupon in Woocommerce”!

Now all you have to do is doublecheck that all your settings are as you’d like them to be and then click the blue “Publish” button on the top right of your screen and give your code to your customers. The discount will apply when they add the code you give them (in this case “APRIL20”) to their shopping cart. 

That’s it – you’re done!

And finally…

We hope that you’ve found this article about how to add a coupon in Woocommerce has been useful. 

If you are a client and have further questions – by all means drop us an email. We can happily arrange a Zoom/Whatsapp call to talk yout through it. As you already know – this is just an example of the extra care and attention that Gandy-Draper clients enjoy for being part of the team.

If you are not yet a Gandy-Draper client and wish that YOU had a web designer who supports you and your business at every turn… contact us today!