One thing all Magento store owners need to take advantage of, as with any other commerce website, is the ability to serve coupons for their customers. By offering coupons you can provide more incentive for people to shop with you by providing special offers such as 10% off one product line or a specific discount on a product bundle.
This functionality comes shipped with Magento by using what are known as Price Rules. Price rules allow you to specify an ‘action’ that takes place in the shopping cart based on what products are ordered. For instance, you can use your Magento admin to specify a rule where if somebody orders x # of one product, they would receive a major discount. The rules are flexible and allow you to specify multiple variations of actions such as ‘give discount if x product is ordered’ or ‘allow all categories of products other than x category’ to offer these discounts. This type of power allows you complete control over discounts and special offers and allows flexibility that most shopping carts do not allow.
How Does Magento Work With Coupons?
When you create rules with Magento, you assign a coupon code with each rule that you create. So if you decide to create a 25% discount for certain categories, you can create a set of rules for each category and assign a unique coupon code for each. This way, you can offer advertisements or promotional mailings to your customer list with a variety of coupon codes for them to use. When they visit your website, add products to their cart and add that coupon code, the shopping cart will automatically apply any discounts that fit the price rules associated with that coupon code. But there is a catch to this great feature. Magento, by default, only allows customers to add *one* coupon per checkout.
Magento Module / Extension for Multiple Coupon Checkout
Whereas Magento only allows you to offer one coupon code for the checkout process, there are different modules or extensions that allow the use of multiple coupons at checkout. One of the best modules that we have found is the Amasty Multiple Coupons module which works with the native “Shopping Cart Rules” section in your Magento admin and offers customers the ability to type in multiple coupons at once into their shopping cart page and enjoy all discounts that apply. So instead of having to set up multiple orders you can enter 2, 3 or even 10 coupons at once during a checkout and all of the discount ‘rules’ will be acted upon automatically for your customers.
How This Can Help Your Magento eCommerce Business
One thing to consider is that you may want to boost sales for certain categories. If you want to get people to take advantage of deals it would not be fair to force them to offer one coupon, place another order entirely, then enter another coupon. Having this flexibility reduces the number of shopping cart abandonment issues and gives customers more incentive to work with you over time.
Another key benefit is that it provides flexibility in terms of testing advertisements and finding out how customers think. For example, if you are trying to find out which special offer is most popular. You can run 2 google adwords campaigns with different discounts on a product, or equal discounts on 2 products you wish to boost sales for, and see which coupons were used when reviewing each order (the coupon code is entered with each order and saved for your reference in the admin).
Normally, you would find that x # of customers choose one coupon promotion over another but, with a limited coupon system, you cannot measure how many customers prefer to take advantage of both. You may find that after your first 250 sales, without the ability to accept multiple coupons per order, 45% prefer the special offer of product A while 55% prefer the special offer of product B. For testing purposes, you may think your ad campaigns can benefit by knowing that product B is more popular due to the special offer. What you will not realize, though, is that maybe 20% of people who prefer promotion B would have acted on promotion A if you enabled multiple coupons per checkout. This is a key data point that you are missing out on by limiting the options available to a customer.
Summary
If you are looking to offer your customers more opportunities to take advantage of special offers, I highly recommend this module. It will work with Magento 1.7 without problems and the developer is very helpful and provides great support. Consider the impact of such modules moving forward and hopefully you will find more sales come your way afterward. For more information on how a module like this can help your website or if you need any help with your Magento website, please contact us with any questions.
Magento Development Lead
