A great way to promote your site is by offering discounts to your shoppers. Magento makes it very easy to create shopping cart price rules, which most of us call coupons. Navigate to Promotions > Shopping Cart Price Rules. Click on Add New Rule.
Note: If you had other Shopping Cart Price Rules, they would be listed here. Once you create a Shopping Cart Price Rule, it is stored in Magento and can be activated, inactivated or edited at any time.
There are four tabs on the left: Rule Information, Conditions, Actions and Labels. On each tab, the required fields are marked with a red asterisk.
Rule Information
- First, give your rule a Name. Use a name that will describe the rule so that just by seeing it in a list, you will know what it is. The coupon code you provide your customers can be something completely different.
- In the Description field, you can describe what the rule is for and/or what it does. This field is optional.
- The Status field is where you will set the rule to be Active or Inactive. If you want customers to be able to use the coupon, set this to Active.
- Customer Groups is where you pick which customers can use the coupon. If you don't have specific customer groups set up on your site, select NOT LOGGED IN and General.
- You can choose to have your customers enter a coupon code to receive the discount, or you can just have the discount automatically applied if certain conditions are met. If you want to have your customers enter a code, set the Coupon field to Specific Coupon. In the Coupon Code field, you can enter the code you want your customers to use, or you can check the Use Auto Generation box to have Magento generate them for you.
- The Uses per Coupon and Customer as well as the From and To Date fields are all optional, but give you flexibility when creating your coupons.
- If you have more than one coupon code that can be used together, you can set the order in which they should be applied with the Priority field. The lower number gets applied first.
- Public in RSS Feed can stay set to Yes.
Conditions
- This is where you set the conditions that must be met in order for your rule, or coupon, to apply. Any word that is bold and underlined has options. You should choose the option that best applies to the situation.
- The green + signs indicate an area where another condition can be added.
- Once you choose a condition, you may get sub-menus to further define the conditions.
Actions
- This tab determines what will happen if all the conditions are met. You can choose to apply a % or fixed amount discount. The Buy X Get Y Free option has some limitations, so you may have to test it to make sure it gives you the exact result you want. Also, make sure you complete the lower portion of the tab if you do NOT want the action to apply to all items.
Labels
- No action is required on this tab.
Make sure you save your rule before exiting!!