Coupons are a great way to increase your sales. However, you’ll want to make sure that customers on your WooCommerce site are only using the coupons that should apply to them. This is where implementing WooCommerce coupon restrictions can help.
WooCommerce provides many ways to restrict coupons. If you really want complete control over your coupons and discounts, however, you might consider using our Advanced Coupons plugin. With Advanced Coupons, you can control discounts through customized cart conditions.
Today, we’re going to take a look at the default methods WooCommerce provides for restricting coupons, the features added through Advanced Coupons, and the ability to turn off coupons entirely. Let’s get started!
Why WooCommerce Coupon Restrictions Are Important
If you don’t restrict your coupons, you could find yourself in trouble. For instance, consider a very common coupon offer: free shipping. You might want free shipping to apply only to orders over $100, because in those cases your profit margin will cover the cost of shipping. If free shipping is applied to items that are as cheap as $5, you could lose money.
By restricting your coupons, you can also make complex, specific offers that appeal directly to set demographics, such as BOGO coupons for those who want to stock up. At the same time, you can make sure that your BOGO coupon doesn’t apply to a loss leader item that already has very low-profit margins.
Before you even get started, you should think about what coupons you want to offer and whether your company will still be able to make money with those offers in place. WooCommerce can ensure that you maintain these restrictions – but it’s up to you to decide what those restrictions should be.
An Introduction to Cart Conditions
Before you can implement coupon restrictions, you need to know a little about cart conditions. These evaluate what is currently in a customer’s cart, in order to determine whether they are eligible for a particular offer. The most popular type of cart condition is the total value in the user’s cart:
Frequently, cart conditions won’t let a user redeem a discount unless they’ve reached a minimum total order value. They can prevent users from ‘stacking’ discounts and using multiple coupon codes at once. In other words, cart conditions reduce the chances that your coupon codes will be abused.
How To Implement WooCommerce Coupon Restrictions (3 Methods)
WooCommerce provides basic coupon restrictions, while the Advanced Coupons plugin makes the entire coupon system smarter. Let’s take a deeper look at how to restrict coupons for WooCommerce using three methods.
1. Turn off WooCommerce coupons
Some companies may only lose money through coupons. If you’re a wholesaler, for example, you already have very tight profit margins.
Fortunately, you can simply turn off coupons through WooCommerce. First, go to WooCommerce > Settings > General. Then uncheck the box labelled: “Enable the use of coupon codes.”
If you change your mind, you can enable coupon codes again at any time.
2. Set up default WooCommerce coupon restrictions
By default, WooCommerce lets you restrict coupons to new users, existing customers, and specific user roles. First, you’ll need to create a coupon:
When setting up WooCommerce coupons, you can choose:
- The type of offer (such as a cart discount or BOGO deal)
- The amount the coupon is for (such as a percentage or flat rate)
- Whether free shipping is applied to the coupon
- Whether the coupon is applied before or after tax
- When the coupon expires
From there, you can select the restrictions you want under Coupon data > Usage restriction:
By default, WooCommerce lets you restrict your coupons based on:
- Minimum spending
- Maximum spending
- Whether a customer can use it with other coupons
- Whether a customer can use it for items that are on sale
- Which specific products it applies to
- The products it does not apply to
- Which product categories it applies to
- The product categories it does not apply to
- Whether it’s restricted based on email addresses
You can also restrict your coupons to specific countries, states or provinces, or zip codes. Usually, this is for shipping purposes; you don’t want to sell a cheap product to a place that’s expensive to ship to.
There are also a few usage limit options:
These restrictions will be enough for some users, but others may need something more advanced. That’s where the Advanced Coupons plugin can help.
3. Set WooCommerce coupon restrictions with Advanced Coupons
Advanced Coupons provides even more methods for offering and restricting coupons. This plugin essentially replaces the default WooCommerce options, so you’ll use the same interface but see an entirely new collection of settings.
After installing Advanced Coupons, you can start by heading to Coupons > Add New:
You’ll see that the entire Coupon data section has been updated to include more options:
When you create a new coupon, you can also select one or more ‘triggers’ under the Cart Conditions section. These are the qualifications that will make the deal available. For example, you could configure the coupon to only work with certain products in specific quantities:
In the above example, the coupon only applies if the user is trying to purchase 50 of a particular type of t-shirt.
You can use triggers to set up BOGO deals, loyalty programs, scheduled coupons, and more. You can customize your coupons as much as you like; for example, you can determine how often the deal can be applied:
The Advanced Coupons plugin makes it possible to create very complex coupons with ease. When combined with the right marketing strategies, these coupons can entice users without the potential for revenue loss. For more details, you can check out the plugin’s extensive documentation.
Conclusion
Coupons are powerful tools to help you boost sales. However, failing to manage them effectively could lead to missed opportunities. To optimize your coupon strategy for WooCommerce, consider the following approaches:
- Turning off coupons entirely
- Using WooCommerce’s default settings.
- Installing the Advanced Coupons plugin.
Do you still have questions about WooCommerce coupon restrictions? Let us know in the comments section below!
