The blog explains how to exclude your best selling products from coupon discounts in WooCommerce. It also covers how to restrict WooCommerce coupons on a specific category or subcategory.
Discount coupons have become an instrumental part of the online shopping experience, so much so that customers are often unwilling to purchase without them and abandon your store. They are a make-or-break factor that significantly influences purchase intent.
However, offering discounts can decrease your net profits or revenue, making it necessary to decide when and where to apply coupons. In some cases, you might need to restrict WooCommerce coupon usage on certain products.
Want to know how to avoid discounting certain products in WooCommerce? Read on to learn more.
Key Takeaways
- Prevent coupon discounts on certain WooCommerce products using built-in features.
- Add advanced restrictions to exclude specific products or categories with a premium Woocommerce discount rules plugin.
Consider you have a coupon ‘Get50OFF’, which offers a 50% discount on all products in a specific category. But what if some products in that category have a cost price higher than 50% of their selling price? If the coupon is applied to these products, the result would be a loss for you.
That’s why it’s wise to exclude certain WooCommerce products from discount coupons. This approach allows you to create as many discount coupons as you want while ensuring that specific high-cost products remain unaffected.
Keeping some products discount-free is a simple way to maintain profitability during discount seasons. It prevents a significant profit drop and helps you earn more without compromising too much during sales.
There can be several reasons for excluding WooCommerce products from discount coupons. It can be due to economical constraints, overlapping offers, unsustainable offers, and more.
Revisiting the example, you can avoid loss by excluding high-cost products from your WooCommerce coupons.
Striking a balance between sales volume and revenue is much harder to achieve, especially if there is a huge drain in profits due to coupon discounts. Excluding certain products from WooCommerce coupons help you establish the right balance between sales volume and revenue.
Here’s how you can do that.
- On your WordPress admin console, go to Marketing > Coupons.
- Click on the coupon from which products are to be excluded. This will open the coupon configuration page.
- Go to the Usage restriction tab under the Coupon data widget.
- Select the products that you want to exclude under the option Exclude products.
- Click on Publish to save the changes made.
In addition to excluding selected individual products, you may also exclude specific product categories as a whole from a coupon. Use the option Exclude categories under the same tab to configure this.
You can use this category exclusion to exclude specific categories of products from the coupon. For example, you can exclude all products in the “tropical clothing” category while running coupon sales for winter clothing.
You may also use the exclude option to exclude specific subcategories. For example, if you want to offer the coupon to all users purchasing from the category “Clothing”, but don’t want to include the subcategory “Pants” in this offer.
Here, the coupon can be used for all products in the ‘clothing’ category except the ones in the ‘pants’ category.
Note: In order to exclude your best-selling products, either key in each product in the exclude product option or add these products to a category and then add it to exclude category.
Since coupons are an important factor that directly influences sales, not employing coupons is ill-advised. The next best thing that you can use is to control how and when the coupon can be used.
However, to gain such close control over the coupons, you will need to use a third-party plugin. Smart Coupons for WooCommerce is a freemium WooCommerce coupon plugin that would allow you to create, and manage coupons in WooCommerce.
With this plugin, you can create different types of coupons that you may find necessary while running your business.
Some of the major types of coupons that you can set up with this WooCommerce coupon plugin include,
- Simple percentage and fixed cart discounts
- Fixed product flat offs
- Buy One Get One and Buy X Get Y offers
- Sign up coupons
- Purchase history based coupons
- Abandoned cart recovery coupons and automated emails
- Discounts to reward repeated purchases
- Store credit vouchers
- Purchasable gift cards
In addition to these, you can also bulk-generate coupons, set up banners with count-down timers, make coupons auto-apply to the cart, and more. Refer to this article on WooCommerce smart coupons to know more.
Now let’s look into some of the situations where you may have to strictly restrict the use of discount coupons.
1-Restrict The Use Of Multiple Coupons
Prerequisite:
The premium version of the WooCommerce smart coupons plugin has to be installed and activated on your WordPress admin console to access this feature.
If your store has multiple coupons, then there is a chance that a customer may qualify for more than one coupon. This can have serious effects on the sales-profit balance. For example, if you have a ‘10% discount on all products’ and a ‘40% discount on all clothes’, a customer buying a cloth can avail of both these discounts. This can create a drop in revenue.
You can rectify this problem by disabling the coupon ‘40% discount on all clothes’ to be used with other coupons in your store. To do this,
- Go to Smart Coupons > All coupons.
- Select the coupon that you want.
- Go to Coupon data > Usage restriction.
- Select the coupon that you don’t want to use with the current coupon under the option Coupon can’t be used with.
- Click on Update to update the changes.
Prerequisite:
The free WooCommerce coupon plugin has to be installed and activated on your WordPress admin console to access this feature
Even if you have highly restricted coupons with product exceptions, they may sometimes not be enough. For instance, in the previous example, to give a 40% discount the marked price should be at least 40% above the cost price. A good way to restrict the drain of such large discounts is by setting a discount limit. For example, ‘40% discount up to $40’. This would help to maintain the discount-price balance.
To set this up,
- Go to Marketing > Coupons.
- Click on the coupon that you want to edit.
- The discount limit can be set up for percentage discounts, so make sure the Discount type under Coupon data > General is Percentage discount.
- Now go to Usage limits and enter the Maximum discount value.
- Update the settings to save the changes.
In the Usage restriction settings, you can limit the coupon eligibility to specific users by entering their email addresses in the Allowed emails field.
It indicates if a coupon is applicable to a particular product in the cart. This filter is triggered during the validation process where the developers can enforce additional conditions or modify the existing ones.
You can display WooCommerce discount coupons on product pages using a shortcode or a custom message field to highlight available discounts on the product page.
Coupon discounts are undoubtedly one of the most common marketing strategies used in WooCommerce. The coupon discounts attract new users to your store and help you retain your existing customers. Coupon discounts provide the push/incentive that your customers need to complete the purchase.
Coupons are even employed to bring back customers who leave by abandoning their carts. However, applying discounts to all products is not always economically viable. You may have to restrict its application with various tools and settings. One such restriction is excluding selected WooCommerce products from WooCommerce coupons. You can set it up with the default coupon features available in WooCommerce.
However, to limit the application and accessibility of coupons further, you will need additional assistance from third parties. One such external solution is the Smart Coupons for WooCommerce plugin from Webtoffee. The plugin is highly beneficial and can be used to achieve almost all WooCommerce coupon use cases.
Hope you have found this article useful. Do let us know if you want any further information in the comments below.
