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, you should offer discount coupons to your customers. The best part is that coupon codes are automatically applied, making 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. 

What is a WooCommerce Auto-apply Coupon?

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 your store to purchase the item 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. 

Why and When Do You Need to Apply a Coupon Code in WooCommerce automatically?

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. 

How to Create a Discount Coupon in WooCommerce?

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:

• Discount type: You can offer 7 types of discounts, such as percentage discounts, fixed cart discounts, fixed product discounts, etc. We are going with a Fixed cart discount, which means a fixed amount will be discounted on an order.
• Coupon amount: Enter the discount amount you want to offer. 
• Allow free shipping:  Check this option to offer free shipping along with this coupon.
• Coupon expiry date: Set an expiration date for this coupon code.

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. 

👉 For more details, you can read our blog on "WooCommerce coupons."

Method 1: Auto Apply Coupon in WooCommerce Checkout Page

This section will show you how to use FunnelKit Funnel Builder to offer auto-apply coupons on the checkout page. 

With this WooCommerce plugin, you can apply the coupon and 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 add order bumps and one-click upsells, which help you increase your business's order value.

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:

Step 1: Add a store checkout

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 three steps: checkout, one-click upsell 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. 

Step 2: Customize the checkout page 

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”.

Scroll down to the "Checkout Form Fields", here, 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.

Step 3: Enable the WooCommerce auto apply coupon option

To enable the WooCommerce auto apply coupon feature, move to the Optimizations tab. Click on the “Auto Apply Coupons” section to expand it. Here, you get three options:

• Auto Apply Coupon:  Choose “yes” to enable auto-apply coupon on the checkout page.
• Coupon code: Enter the coupon that will be applied.
• Disable Coupon Field: Deactivate the coupon field so that users don’t have to enter a coupon code manually. 

After that, click on “Save” 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.

Step 4: Enable store checkout 

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. 

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.

Method 2: Auto Apply a Discount Coupon in WooCommerce Mini Cart and Boost AOV

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, thus improving 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.

After installing the FunnelKit Cart, follow the steps described below to offer auto apply the coupon in the WooCommerce cart.

Step 1: Enable the mini cart option 

First, you need to enable the mini cart option. To do 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 

Step 2: Add auto apply coupon 

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. 

To do so, move to the Rewards tab and click on “Create Reward.”

Now, to set up an auto apply discount coupon, customize the following options:

• Type:  With FunnelKit Cart, you can create three types of discounts: Free shipping, discount, and free gift. Here we will choose Discount.
• Icon Title:  Provide the discount title. This text will be visible when someone hovers over the icon.
• Message:  Enter the message that will be shown on the top shopping bar. You can use the merge tag {{remaining_amount}} to show the remaining amount to get the reward. For example, here we have added the message “Add items worth {{remaining_amount}} more to $30 OFF as our discount is meant to provide $30 OFF on orders worth $150 or above.
• Amount to Get Reward: Provide the minimum amount one has to purchase to get the reward. This is important to calculate the message that will show up on the cart. In our case, it’s $150.
• Coupon: Provide the coupon code you want to auto-apply on the mini cart.

After setting up all the options, click on Save to update. 

Step 3: Test the auto-apply discount 

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. 

Method 3: Auto-Apply WooCommerce Coupon In Abandoned Cart Email

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 to get discounts.

Based on these two statistics, 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 from the WordPress dashboard.

Using this tool, you can send any type of WooCommerce follow-up emails or post-purchase emails easily. 

Step 1: Enable cart tracking 

After activating FunnelKit Automations, you need to enable cart tracking so the system can track when a user abandons the cart.

To do so, go to FunnelKit Automations ⇒ Settings. Then, check the “Enable Cart Tracking” option on the Cart tab. 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.

Step 2: Add new automation

The next step is to create a new automation. For that, navigate to FunnelKit Automations ⇒ Automations and then click on ‘Create 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. 

Step 3:  Create a coupon code (optional)

We need to create a coupon before we can add an auto-apply coupon URL to the email body. To do 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. After the first delay, click on the + icon 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. 

Step 4: Add auto-apply coupon code URL in the email body 

Now, we will add the coupon code URL in the first email. To do so, click on the first email step. 

You can design your email using four methods: Visual Builder (New), Rich Text, Raw HTML, and Visual Builder. 

Here, we will share how to add an auto-apply coupon using Rich Text (default email) and Visual Builder (new).

By default, the abandoned cart recipe comes with a text-based email template. To add an auto-apple coupon URL, click the {{..}} merge tag icon. Then, look for the Cart Recovery URL merge tag and click on the ⚙️icon. 

After that, you can choose whether you want to use a static coupon or a dynamic coupon.

Use static coupon

Choose the coupon type as a Static Coupon, and provide the coupon you want to use. This will give you a dynamic link that will take users directly to the checkout page. Click on “Copy” to copy the link. 

Use dynamic coupon

Choose the 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. 

Here, we are going with a dynamic coupon.

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 applied coupon code, save the email.

Here is a preview of the email with the auto-apply coupon Woocommerce URL. The coupon is applied automatically on the checkout page. 

Step 5: Add auto-apply coupon link using cart link block (optional)

Our experts highly recommend using the Visual Builder(New), as it offers many ready-to-use prebuilt email templates. 

Note: If you use Visual Builder (New), you can skip the above step of customizing the email text built with rich text.

Here, we are importing the Abandoned Cart template. 

Now, you can customize the email template according to your preference. 

The Visual Builder includes a "Cart Link" block that adds a cart recovery URL to a CTA. This URL directs users to the website where their cart items have already been added.

To ensure the coupon is automatically applied when users click the CTA, enable "Auto Apply Coupon" and input the generated coupon code. Depending on your preference, you can insert the code manually or dynamically. In this case, we are using an automatically generated coupon.

For this, choose the Coupon type “Automation” and select the coupon you created in the previous step.

Save the email after adding the auto-apply coupon URL and making the customizations. 

You can add this link to the other emails, like the first email. 

Step 6: Activate the automation

After all the customization is done, it’s time to add and make your auto coupon 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.

Note: You can include an auto-apply coupon link in all your post-purchase emails using the same process with FunnelKit Funnel Builder.

Frequently Asked Questions About WooCommerce Auto Apply Coupon 

• How to auto-apply coupon code in WooCommerce?

You can auto-apply coupons in WooCommerce on the checkout page or mini cart. To do this, you must install additional plugins like FunnelKit Funnel Builder and Funnelkit Cart. In this blog, we have shared how to use these plugins to offer auto-apply coupons in WooCommerce. 

• What is auto apply coupon?

An auto-apply coupon automatically applies a discount or special offer to a purchase without the user manually entering a code.

• How do I add a link that applies a coupon code to a WooCommerce cart?

You can use FunnelKit Funnel Builder to make a sales funnel. Turn on the auto-apply coupon option. Then, when people click on your sales funnel link and go to the checkout page, the coupon code will automatically apply. You can also create a link with FunnelKit Automations. Share this link via email. When people click it and reach the checkout page, the coupon code will apply without them needing to do anything.

• Can you schedule a coupon in WooCommerce?

To schedule a coupon in WooCommerce, set the start and expiry dates under "Usage Restriction" when creating or editing the coupon.

Ready to offer WooCommerce Auto Apply Coupon?

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, the non-coding method is simpler. It grants you greater control over how and where you want to offer auto-apply coupons.

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!