Applying Discounts and Coupons in E-Commerce
Discounts and coupons are powerful marketing tools that allow you to give your clients special offers on products or categories, allowing wholesalers to purchase at special rates, providing incentives through your offline advertising or help clear ‘difficult to sell’ stock amongst many other uses.
What Are the Differences Between a Coupon and Discount?
The key differences between a coupon and a discount is that a coupon requires a special code to be entered during the checkout phase, whereas a discount will apply to all of your website visitors, as long as the conditions you can set below are met.
Coupons are therefore espescially useful for promotions in magazines or other forms of advertising.
Coupon / Discount Effect
You can choose between Free Standard Shipping, Flate Rate discount or percentage discount. You can set up more than one coupon or discount at a time to have combinations of these.
A flat rate discount would be 20% off if you spend over $150 on our store.
A percentage discount would be ‘5% discount on all our goods.’
Working Name
You have to assign a name or phrase to the discount you create. This text will also be shown to your website visitors to inform them of the discounts available so it should be meaningful and short.
Some examples of a ‘Working Name’ would be ‘Free Standard Shipping on orders of $35 or more,’ ‘10% discount if you by 3 or more products from our store.’ You can also remove the text that appears on the store with this addition in your includes.asp file.
Coupon Code
If you’re creating a coupon, you will need to assign a coupon code. This is the code your website users will need to enter to access the discount.
FOr instance, if your coupon code is GH777733D then in your magazine advertising you could put the following ‘Special offer’ for readers of this magazine. Enter the code GH777733D during checkout to receive a 5% discount.
Number Available
With some promotions you may want to limit the number available. For instance, ‘5% discount to the first 50 people who purchase.’ If you do not want to limit the number available, just leave the field blank.
