How to Auto Apply Coupon in WooCommerce : 3 Easy Ways
Editorial Team
September 22, 2023
A WooCommerce auto apply coupon can ensure a smooth buying experience for your shoppers, resulting in loyal customers.
In a survey, 38% of shoppers said they ended up spending more than they initially intended because they came across a coupon.
So, if you want to boost your sales and average order value, then you should offer discount coupons to your customers. And the best part is when coupon codes are automatically applied; it makes shopping even more convenient for users.
While WooCommerce doesn't have built-in support for automatic coupon applications on the checkout page, you can achieve this through custom coding or by using WooCommerce plugins. However, opting for custom coding may not be the most efficient solution for many users.
In this blog, we will share three ways of offering WooCommerce auto apply coupon codes without any coding knowledge.
Contents
A WooCommerce auto-apply coupon is a feature that automatically adds a discount to a customer's order without them having to enter a coupon code. It makes it easier for customers to get discounts when shopping online.
It’s a more convenient way of shopping as users don’t have to search or remember the coupon code to enjoy the discount.
This is a great way to increase sales and attract customers to come back to your store and purchase it again.
For example, if you offer 10% Off on orders above $150, the coupon code will be applied automatically to the cart order value above $150, and the discount will be calculated.
The answer to why you should offer auto apply coupons is simple: to ensure customer satisfaction.
If you are going to offer a discount anyway, then why make users work by making them search and enter the coupon code, making the process unnecessarily lengthy? By applying coupons automatically, you can save users time and effort, ensuring a good shopping experience.
Besides, since you make the checkout process frictionless, you can also prevent them from abandoning their shopping carts.
Plus, if you can ensure a smooth shopping experience on your website by incentivizing them automatically, you can expect them to become repeat customers.
In short, offering auto apply coupons in your WooCommerce store offers plenty of benefits.
So, the question arises: when should you offer to apply for a coupon?
You can offer WooCommerce auto apply coupons during seasonal sales, promotional events, or whenever you want to boost overall sales by offering discount coupons.
For example, you can offer discounts on WooCommerce first order, first purchase anniversary, etc.
The basic idea is to ensure your users have the best shopping experience. So whenever you offer a coupon code that users can use to get the discount, you can auto-apply that on the checkout rather than making users manually enter it.
Before we can show you how to automatically apply coupon in WooCommerce, let’s check how you can create a coupon code first.
To create a coupon code from the WordPress dashboard, go to Marketing ⇒ coupons and click on Coupons.
First, set up the coupon code. You can enter a custom coupon name or generate a random marketing coupon code by clicking the “Generate Coupon Code” button. Here, we are going with a custom coupon code.
After that, provide a description; this is optional.
In the coupon data section, on the General tab, you can set the following options:
You can find additional settings on the usage restriction and usage limits tab. For example, on the Usage restriction tab, we are setting a minimum amount someone has to order to avail of this discount. For more details, check this guide on Coupon code by WooCommerce.
After setting up, click on “Publish” to save the coupon code and make it usable.
Now that you have generated the coupon code, let’s check in the next sections how you can auto-apply a coupon in WooCommerce based on the cart total in different ways.
In this section, we will show you how to offer auto apply coupons on the checkout page using FunnelKit Funnel Builder.
With this WooCommerce plugin, not only can you offer to apply the coupon, but you can also create beautiful sales funnel pages such as landing pages, opt-in pages, checkout pages, thank you pages, and so on, without requiring any coding knowledge.
In addition, you can also add order bumps and one-click upsells, which helps you increase the order value in your business.
Note: We will create a custom store checkout or global checkout, which replaces the default WooCommerce checkout page.
Before we start creating a custom global checkout and offering an auto apply coupon, you need to install and activate FunnelKit Funnel Builder.
After activating FunnelKit Funnel Builder, follow the following steps:
To create a new store checkout, navigate to FunnelKit ⇒ Store Checkout and click on “Create Store Checkout.”
Now, you should see a new window with all the prebuilt templates by FunnelKit. Choose your favorite page builder and hover on the template you like. To preview the template pages, hover and click on the “Preview” button.
Here, we are going with the Elementor page builder and the template “Minimalist.” This template has two steps: checkout and thank you.
Before you can import this template to be your store checkout, you need to decide whether you want a single-page checkout or multi-page checkout. We are going with the simple single-page layout.
To import the template you choose, click on “Import this funnel,” then provide a name and click on Add.
This will add and replace your default checkout with the newly created store checkout.
To edit the product, click on the Edit option next to the checkout page.
On the Design tab, you can customize the design of the checkout page template. For more details, check our blog “How to Customize WooCommerce Checkout Page”.
On the Fields tab, you can rearrange or customize the form fields; for more details, check this blog “WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor”. If you want you can also add any custom field to the checkout page.
To enable the WooCommerce auto apply coupon feature, move to the Optimizations tab. Here, go to the “Auto Apply Coupons” section. Here, you get three options:
After that, click on “Save changes” to update the options. Please note you can come back anytime and remove/ disable the auto apply coupon code from here.
Along with auto-apply coupons, you can also optimize the express checkout buttons like Google Pay and Apple Pay, google address auto-complete, enhanced phone field, etc. For more details on all the optimization options, check out the checkout page optimization guide.
Note: Like the checkout page, you can customize the thank you page as well.
The last step is to enable the store checkout so your customers can enjoy the WooCommerce auto apply coupon on the checkout page.
For that, come back to the store checkout page and turn on the “Enable Store Checkout” button.
This will ensure your store checkout with the auto apply coupon feature is live.
To test the process, add some products to the cart and try to checkout.
Here is our test order. Since our coupon needs a minimum order of 150, we have added products worth more than $150.
You can offer an order bump on the checkout page to encourage users to increase their order total in order to enjoy the discount code. To learn more, read our blog on how you can offer order bumps using FunnelKit.
This was all about how to offer WooCommerce auto apply coupons on the checkout page. Move on to the next section to find out how you can offer auto apply coupons on the mini cart.
FunnelKit Cart lets you offer an excellent way of shopping for your customers. With this tool, customers can check out their order details, such as products, product quantity, price, order, etc., from anywhere on the website with just one click without going to the cart or checkout page.
Moreover, you can offer upsell and cross-sell on the mini shopping cart so users can add products to their cart with one click and thus improve the order value.
And the most effective way of ensuring your users add more products to their order is to offer them discounts. With FunnelKit Cart, you can enable the WooCommerce auto apply coupon feature and show a message on the shopping bar to push users to add more products.
To offer an auto apply coupon on the mini cart, you must install and activate the FunnelKit Cart plugin. You will need both the free and pro version.
Note: FunnelKit cart’s premium features are available for users with FunnelKit Funnel Builder Plus and above.
After installing the FunnelKit Cart, follow the steps described below to offer auto apply the coupon in the WooCommerce cart.
Firstly, you need to enable the mini cart option. For that, go to FunnelKit ⇒ Cart and turn on the “Enable Cart’ toggle button.
After enabling the slide-in cart, you can set up different options; for those, refer to this blog, “How to customize WooCommerce mini cart by FunnelKit.”
You can also watch the video below
To learn how you can set up upsell and cross, you can watch this video below
FunnelKit Cart has a smart rewards feature that allows you to offer three types of rewards to your customers based on different conditions to increase the order value. Here, we will share how you can offer a discount coupon and how you can ensure it’s auto-applied on the mini cart.
For that, move to the Rewards tab and click on “Create Reward.”
Now, to set up an auto apply discount coupon, customize the following options:
After setting up all the options, click on Save to update.
For more details on setting up other types of rewards using FunnelKit, check this blog “Offer Rewards on WooCommerce Cart For Higher Upsell Rate.”
To test if the discount reward works according to the conditions you applied for, go to the storefront and add the product to your mini cart.
According to our condition and coupon code, users will enjoy $30 OFF for an order threshold worth $150 or above.
This is how easily you can set WooCommerce auto apply coupons in a mini cart.
According to Baymard Institute the average cart abandonment rate is around 70%, And in a recent survey, 80% of shoppers claimed they only sign for emails in order to get discounts.
Based on these two statistics, we can safely say you can recover a good portion of your abandoned carts by offering users an incentive through a discount to complete the order.
An effective way of recovering carts is to offer automatic discounts for abandoned carts in WooCommerce. You can create a custom URL that includes the cart contents and coupon code. When users click the WooCommerce apply coupon with the URL, they are redirected to the checkout page with the discount auto-applied.
Let’s see how you can do this using our step-by-step guide.
To follow these steps, you must install and activate FunnelKit Automations.
This auto apply coupon extension is the most potent and highest-rated WooCommerce email marketing tool. This tool allows you to create, run, and monitor automated email campaigns right from the WordPress dashboard.
You can send any type of WooCommerce follow-up emails or post purchase emails easily using this tool.
After activating FunnelKit Automations, you need to enable cart tracking so the system can track when a user abandons the cart.
For that, go to FunnelKit Automations ⇒ Settings. Then, on the Cart tab, check the “Enable Cart Tracking” option. This will activate the cart track.
You can also set other options such as Wait Period, Cool Off Period, Lost Cart (days), etc. For more details, check our documentation on “Enable Cart Tracking”.
Don’t forget to click on Save Changes after enabling the cart.
The next step is to create a new automation. For that, navigate to FunnelKit Automations ⇒ Automations (NextGen) and then click on ‘Add New Automation’.
Now, you can see all the pre-built templates by FunnelKit Automations. Here, we will choose the Abandoned cart reminder template.
For that, click on the template.
To import this prebuilt template, click on “Import,” provide a name and click on Create.
This will add automation that sends three reminder emails to users so they come back to complete the order.
Before we can add an auto-apply coupon URL to the email body, we need to create a coupon first. For that, we need to add a new step that will create a dynamic coupon.
We will send the coupon code URL with the first email, so we need to add an event before that. Click on the + icon after the first delay and choose Action.
Move to the WooCommerce tab, choose Create Coupon, and click on Done.
Now provide the coupon title, discount type, amount coupon code prefix, etc., and click on ‘Save’ to save the discount coupon code. For more details, read our documentation on personalized coupon codes.
Now, we will add the coupon code URL in the first email. For that, click on the first email step.
To get the coupon code, click on the {{..}} merge tag icon. Then, look for the Cart Recovery URL merge tag and click on the ⚙️icon.
Now, choose coupon type as a dynamic coupon, and select the coupon code you created in the previous step from the drop-down. This will give you a dynamic link that will take users directly to the checkout page. Click on “Copy” to copy the link.
You can now add the link as a URL or in an anchor text in your email body.
After adding the Cart recovery link with the apply coupon code, Save the email.
Like the first email, you can add this link to the other emails as well.
After all the customization is done, it’s time to add and make your auto coupons
automation go live. For that, turn on the toggle button.
And that’s it. Your automation to send abandoned cart emails with auto apply coupon WooCommerce URL is ready.
Here is a preview of the email with the auto apply coupon Woocommerce URL, and the coupon is applied automatically on the checkout page.
For more details on abandoned cart emails, check our blog “How To Send WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails: The Complete Guide”.
Enhancing your WooCommerce shopping experience is a breeze when you implement auto-apply coupons. This not only streamlines the checkout process but also has the potential to boost your sales significantly.
While some may opt for the 'Woocommerce apply coupon programmatically' approach, we firmly believe that the non-coding method is simpler and grants you greater control over how and where you want to offer auto apply coupons.
In fact, we recommend leveraging all three methods outlined in this blog to maximize the impact of offering WooCommerce auto-apply coupons.
But that's not all. If you integrate FunnelKit into your strategy, you won't be limited to auto-apply coupons alone. This invaluable plugin empowers you to create dynamic sales funnels and introduce enticing offers like order bumps and upsells, all designed to supercharge your revenue.
Embark on your journey with FunnelKit today to unlock the potential of WooCommerce auto-apply coupons and so much more. Elevate your e-commerce game and watch your business thrive!