Create Coupons

Offering discounted pricing is one of the most effective methods for promoting your online courses and increasing sales. Who doesn't love a bargain?!

In this article:

Create Coupons

Redeem Coupons

Automatically Apply Coupons

Understand Your Coupons Table

Coupons and Group Orders

App Store Solution: Promote Your Discounts with Promos Kit

Important Considerations

Create Coupons

Thinkific makes it super simple to run special promotions using the Coupons feature, available as part of any upgraded plan. In this article, we’ll show you how to create coupon codes for your products and how they can be redeemed by your customers.

To get started with creating coupons:

1. From your Admin Dashboard, select Sales
2. Select Coupons
3. Click + New coupon
4. Select the type of coupon you want to create:
   1. Code: customers must enter a coupon code at checkout
   2. Volume discount: Automatically applied when minimum purchase requirements are met. Cannot be applied to subscriptions or payment plans.
5. Fill out the coupon or discount information in the Details, Conditions, and Coupon code sections as described below.

Drive higher value B2B sales for your learning products by automatically rewarding and incentivizing bulk purchases, boosting average order value, and simplifying every step of the sales process with Volume Discounts! 

Volume discounts are available to customers on Grow and above with TCommerce enabled, as part of the Group Orders functionality. To learn more about this feature and how to use it, see: Increase Group Order Sales with Volume Discounts.

Details

The information here applies to the entire coupon or volume discount you're creating. 

• Coupon name - this is the description of the coupon that the customer will see on checkout after they apply the coupon, as well as on their receipt.

Conditions

Each coupon you create has its own discount configuration, which determines the coupon expiry date, applicable products and prices, the type of discount, and the duration.

• Expiry date UTC (Optional) - adding an expiry date for your coupons is an excellent way to give a sense of urgency to your campaign, which can lead to a greater conversion. This date is for how long learners can use the coupon.

Coupons will no longer work as of 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on the expiry date set. For example, if you set the expiry date as August 15th, the code will be valid until 11:59PM UTC on August 14th.

• Applicable products - choose which specific products and pricing options the discount can be applied to. For a site-wide promo, check off All Products (selected by default). You will see your products sorted by product type, then your additional prices in the dropdown.

If you have multiple pricing options on your product, selecting that product will apply the discount to the default price only. If you want the discount to apply to the additional pricing options, you will need to select them from the Additional Prices list.

• Discount value and discount type - you can choose whether the coupon will discount a set percentage (select the % off) or discount a set fixed amount (select the $ off). Specify the amount or percentage to discount.

Volume discount can only be set up as a percentage discount.

• Discount duration (Optional, Coupon codes only) - select the duration (in months) of the discount if it is applied to products with subscription-based or payment plan pricing. This allows you to offer introductory deals, e.g. “Your first two months free”, which is a great way to give people a free trial and capture the customer’s billing information at the same time.

The coupon period for subscription-based or payment plan products will always be in months. Take this into consideration when creating your coupon if your payment schedule is on a quarterly or annual basis.

For example, if you have a payment schedule on a yearly basis and you want a student to receive the first two years for free, you would need to create a coupon for 13 months. This way your student will have the first billing period free (the 1st month) and the second billing for the second year free (the 13th month). 

You can leave the Discount duration field blank to give access to a subscription or payment plan at a permanent discount.

For a more detailed explanation of how the Coupon discount is applied to subscription or payment plans, including examples, take a look at How Do Coupon Discounts Apply to Multiple-Payment Plans?

For subscriptions with a custom first payment, coupons can only apply to the custom first payment (1 month) or applied to the whole subscription including the custom first payment. For monthly payment plans with a custom first payment, coupons can be applied to any duration.

• Minimum purchase duration (Volume discount only) - specify the minimum number of seats a buyer needs to purchase for the discount to apply. Learn more: Increase Group Order Sales with Volume Discounts.

Codes

If you are creating a coupon code, you can create multiple codes that are associated with the same coupon. This allows you to adjust the discount configuration for multiple codes at once. Use the search bar at the top of the section to find a specific code to check the quantity and remaining value or edit/remove that code. 

For each code, provide the following information:

• Code - Pick the unique code that your students will apply during checkout to receive their discount. At least one code is required for each coupon that you create. You can create multiple codes for the same coupon by using the +Add New Code button.

Codes cannot contain special characters or spaces. Codes are not case sensitive.

• Maximum uses (Optional) - Use this field to limit the number of times a specific code can be used. For unlimited uses, leave this field blank.

If you have specified the number of maximum uses for your coupon code and find that you have 0 remaining codes left, you can increase the quantity of your codes. For example, if you have a quantity = 1, and remaining = 0 for a specific code, you would need to increase the code's quantity = 2 if you want your students to continue to use that code. Upon saving, you'll see that your remaining value for that specific code will now be updated to 1. 

Redeem Coupons

Students can easily apply the coupon on the checkout page to redeem their discount.

1. On the checkout payment page, click on the Have a coupon? link.
2. Input the coupon code in the text box that appears
3. Press Apply
4. The checkout will update the order detail with the discount applied if the coupon is successfully added.
5. The student can complete the checkout as normal!

Automatically Apply Coupons

You can make it even simpler for customers to redeem their offer by sending them to your course landing page or checkout via a URL where the discount is already applied. This means your students will not need to type in a coupon code at checkout!

Learn how to set that up here.

Understand Your Coupons Table

Your coupons table includes an overview of all created coupons, quantities, expiry dates and more! To access the table:

1. From your Admin Dashboard, select Sales
2. Select Coupons

The coupons in this table are sorted by creation date - new coupons created will be added to the top of the list.

Here's how to read your coupons table:

Coupons and Group Orders

If you are using TCommerce: Group Orders or TCommerce: Invoicing features, when a Group Order purchase is made or an invoice for multiple seats is paid, a unique coupon is generated for the quantity of seats purchased. The coupon name will have the following format: Group Order: PROMO-XXXXXXX-YYYYYY, where:

• XXXXXXX is a User ID: the ID of the user who made a group order purchase (Seat Manager). The ID can be found in the User Table: User Report and Filters
• YYYYYY is a Product ID: the ID of the product that the buyer has purchased using Group Order functionality. The Product ID can be found here: How to Find Your Product ID.

Every time a seat is claimed, the number of remaining coupons is reduced. When a Seat Manager buys more seats for the same product, the coupon quantity will be updated with the additional seats purchased. This allows you to track the number of remaining seats.

Note that these coupons cannot be modified.

Learn more here: TCommerce: Group Orders and TCommerce: Invoicing

App Store Solution: Promote Your Discounts with Promos Kit

If you're looking to increase the visibility of your latest coupons and promotions, you might also want to take a look at the Promos Kit app, available in the Thinkific App Store.

Promo Kits offers a powerful set of sales and promotional widgets that you can use on your Thinkific site for any promotion — from Black Friday, the holidays, New Years, to your birthday. Promotions are a great way to turn visitors into students, and Promos Kit will make it easy for you to do just that.

Important Considerations

• Coupons will no longer work as of 00:00 UTC on the expiry date set. For example, if you set the expiry date as August 15th, the code will be valid until 11:59PM UTC on August 14th.
• Coupon expiry dates have a five-year limit. Due to this, we do not recommend setting a coupon's expiry date to a value that is more than five years in the future. If you would like to offer long-term or evergreen coupons, we recommend leaving the expiry field blank to avoid any issues with redemption in the future.
• Coupons that have multiple users (quantity is larger than 1), can be used by the same student multiple times.
• With our built-in payment integrations, there is a minimum payment of $0.50, so if your coupon discounts the price of your course to between $0.01 to $0.49, your student will not be able to complete the transaction.
• If you are using TCommerce's Sales Tax and VAT Solution, the tax will be automatically calculated on the final price of the product after the coupon has been applied.
• You cannot set coupons to have a zero-dollar ($0) value on subscriptions or payment plans. This is not commonly used, however, we have seen some customers use $0 coupons for internal tracking purposes. If you are setting up $0 coupons for tracking, they can only be applied to one-time pricing options.
• If you previously created a coupon and then downgraded to a plan that doesn't have access to the coupon feature (the Free plan), your coupons will not be available for use for future orders.
• Coupons are not case-sensitive
• For subscriptions with a custom first payment, coupons can only apply to the custom first payment (1 month) or be applied to the whole subscription, including the custom first payment. For monthly payment plans with a custom first payment, coupons can be applied to any duration.
• Coupons added to invoices will not appear in the Coupons table. Learn more: TCommerce: Invoicing.