You've probably used WooCommerce's built-in coupon feature, and it's fine for simple discounts. But if you want to seriously improve conversions and create complex promotions, you need something more.
This is exactly what the Smart Coupons for WooCommerce plugin promises to provide. In this detailed review, let’s see if this plugin can indeed help you turn your promotions into high-performing campaigns.
Types of Discounts
When you try to create a new coupon, you’ll find a Discount type dropdown menu, which actually showcases the variety of promotions you can make.
Standard Discount Types
Smart Coupons integrates into core WooCommerce discount types and gives you precise control over them. These include:
- Percentage discount
- Fixed cart discount
- Fixed product discount
Subscription-Specific Discounts
If you run a subscription-based business, the best WooCommerce discount plugin for you will be one that supports recurring payments. Smart Coupons excels here, with a few coupon types tailored specifically for subscriptions:
- Sign Up Fee Discount: This type allows you to offer a flat value discount on the initial sign-up fee for a subscription product.
- Sign Up Fee % Discount: Similar to the above, but it applies a percentage discount to the initial sign-up fee. This is great for acquiring new subscribers.
- Recurring Product Discount: Here, you can offer a fixed value discount on each recurring payment of a subscription product.
- Recurring Product % Discount: This applies a percentage discount to each recurring payment of a subscription product.
Unique Discount Types
Smart Coupons for WooCommerce also supports two unique discount types that are different from traditional coupons:
- Store Credit / Gift Certificate: While it appears as a discount type, it actually allows you to offer gift cards and issue store credit to customers. You can let customers purchase and send gift cards of any amount, perfect for holidays or referrals. It also allows you to offer store credit instead of cash refunds as a smart way to retain revenue and encourage customers to return for future purchases.
Key Features
Smart Coupons for WooCommerce packs some truly smart built-in features, such as:
- Advanced Restrictions and Usage Limits: Smart Coupons takes the built-in coupon control and adds various features to it. You can limit coupons to new users only for welcome discounts, set precise expiry times down to the minute for flash sales, or even define a maximum discount limit for percentage offers to protect your margins.
- Location and Payment Restrictions: It even lets you restrict coupons by location (country, city, postal/zip code), payment methods, shipping methods, and even user roles.
- Product-Specific Controls: You can also add restrictions based on product attributes (like color or size) and product taxonomy (like tags and visibility).
- Flexible Tiered Pricing: You can offer tiered pricing based on either the customer's order total or the product quantity, which is an excellent way to encourage customers to spend more for higher discounts.
To make sure your coupons get used effectively, Smart Coupons for WooCommerce offers thoughtful display and automation features, such as:
- URL Coupons: This feature makes it incredibly easy for customers to claim a discount. They can simply click a unique URL, and the coupon is applied automatically without having to manually type in the code.
- Auto-Apply Coupons: This is a fantastic feature that allows coupons to be automatically added to the customer's cart when they meet the necessary criteria, streamlining the checkout.
- Bulk Generation and Emailing: If you're running big campaigns, you can bulk generate thousands of unique coupon codes in one go. You can then choose to add them to your store, export them to a CSV, or even bulk email them directly to users from within the plugin.
- Targeting Specific Cart Items: You get the choice to apply discounts to the most expensive or cheapest product in the cart, which helps boost your average order value or make customers feel like they've scored a huge win.
Smart Coupons also provides features for building long-term customer relationships and store revenue:
- Cashback Coupons: You can reward customers with cashback coupons that give them store credit after purchasing specific products, driving repeat business.
- Next Order Coupons: You can set up coupons specifically designed for the customer's next order, a direct way to encourage repeat purchases and loyalty.
- Gift Card Printing: For a more traditional touch, the plugin helps you create physical gift cards by allowing you to easily print coupon codes for distribution.
Integration
When it comes to integrations, Smart Coupons for WooCommerce seamlessly works with both WooCommerce's core features and various third-party tools.
For core WooCommerce features, you'll find that you can easily organize your coupons using the native coupon categories. It also significantly expands the standard usage restrictions by adding advanced options to limit coupons by user roles, specific payment methods, shipping methods, product attributes, and even product taxonomy.
Apart from this, it truly enhances coupon scheduling by giving you complete control over the start and expiry dates down to the minute. The Gift Card & Store Credit features are also deeply integrated with the core, allowing you to easily issue and manage store credit and gift cards directly within WooCommerce. Impressively, it also supports the new WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) system, meaning your store remains fast and efficient even with complex discount rules.
Moving beyond WooCommerce's core, Smart Coupons integrates with various popular third-party plugins and tools such as:
- It integrates seamlessly with other StoreApps products. For example, it works perfectly with their Smart Manager plugin for bulk editing and managing coupons from an Excel-like spreadsheet, and with Smart Offers for implementing advanced upsells, BOGO, cross-sells, and order bumps.
- For stores using WooCommerce Subscriptions, the generated coupons work specifically with your subscription products, allowing for both sign-up fee discounts and recurring product discounts.
- When it comes to affiliate & marketing tools, it integrates with Affiliate for WooCommerce, which allows store credits to be paid out as affiliate commissions. It also works with Email Customizer Pro to attach customized coupons to transactional emails for better customer engagement, and with Name Your Price to send coupons with restrictions based on the customer’s quoted price.
- For global stores, it integrates with Aelia Currency Switcher to offer multi-currency support to issue coupons that work in multiple currencies.
- Other integrations include Chained Products, which lets you offer discounts on product bundles and chained product deals, and WooCommerce Bookings & Smart Refunder, enabling you to issue store credit as refunds for booking cancellations.
Ease of Use
Smart Coupons for WooCommerce builds upon the native WooCommerce coupon interface. This means that if you're already comfortable creating coupons in WooCommerce, you'll find using Smart Coupons easy to use right from the start. You can navigate to Marketing > Coupons in your WordPress dashboard, and from there, the entire coupon creation and management process feels like an extension of what you already know.
It uses the same well-organized tab system interface to arrange all the different settings for generating coupons. You can click through familiar tabs like General, Usage restriction, and Usage limits to configure the features. Most settings are configurable with simple clicks, selections, or typing in the provided field. What's more, the plugin makes it easy to spot its own added settings, as they typically have a subtle green background, clearly indicating which options are part of Smart Coupons' extended capabilities.
However, when it comes to the workflow for creating some specific coupon types, such as a BOGO deal, you will need to reference the documentation. These particular setups aren't always directly clear from the interface itself.
Beyond the individual coupon settings, the plugin also lets you configure its Global Settings through WooCommerce > Settings. You'll find a dedicated Smart Coupons tab there, which organizes overall plugin settings across multiple pages. The interface here also thoughtfully matches the familiar WooCommerce settings interface, ensuring you can easily manage everything from one central location without any extra learning.
Reporting and Analytics
While Smart Coupons doesn’t have its own dedicated analytics dashboard, it seamlessly integrates into WooCommerce's core analytics dashboard.
This means that you don't have to jump between different interfaces to understand your overall store performance. All your coupon data feeds into WooCommerce's native reports, allowing you to track how your discounts contribute to sales, average order value, and conversion rates. This ensures you can use your existing WooCommerce reporting tools to make data-driven decisions about your promotional strategies.
Price
Smart Coupons for WooCommerce does not have a free version. Instead, all its advanced coupon features for dynamic pricing are available through its premium version.
This premium version is available via the WooCommerce Marketplace and offers a single plan that includes all features. It costs $129 per year. However, if you choose to pay for 2 years upfront, you can get a 20% off their annual plan, which is a great way to save.
Summary: Is Smart Coupons for WooCommerce the Right Discount Plugin for You?
Deciding on a coupon plugin often comes down to one question: Will it help you sell more? In the case of Smart Coupons for WooCommerce, the answer is yes, but with a few important trade-offs. The plugin provides the features to directly influence purchasing patterns through strategic features like tiered pricing and next-order coupons.
However, these features come at a price. At $129 per year, it's a considerable investment, especially when you consider its limitations.
The most notable tradeoff is the use of the outdated WooCommerce interface and the lack of a dedicated analytics dashboard. Furthermore, creating advanced discount rules can feel unnecessarily complicated, often requiring you to rely on documentation for what should be a straightforward process.
This discount plugin is best for merchants who prioritize the WooCommerce interface and are willing to work around its complexity to get the work done.
Smart Coupons for WooCommerce — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best coupon plugin for WooCommerce?
Smart Coupons for WooCommerce is the best coupon plugin. It’s a powerful plugin that offers advanced features like gift cards, BOGO deals, store credits, and bulk generation, which go far beyond WooCommerce's default capabilities.
How to generate a coupon in WooCommerce?
Simply navigate to Marketing > Coupons in your WordPress dashboard and click ‘Add Coupon.’ Choose your discount type (like fixed or percentage), set the amount, any coupon restrictions, usage limit, and then click ‘Publish’ to make it live.
What are smart offers in WooCommerce?
Smart offers in WooCommerce are advanced, targeted promotions that go beyond simple discounts. They often include BOGO deals, upsells, or discounts that apply automatically when specific conditions are met. Plugins like Smart Coupons let you easily create these complex, high-converting offers.
How to auto-apply coupons in WooCommerce?
The Smart Coupons plugin makes it simple to auto-apply coupons. When creating or editing a coupon, just enable the ‘Auto-apply?’ checkbox. The coupon will then be automatically applied to a customer's cart as soon as they meet the specific usage restrictions you have set for it.
How do I generate bulk coupons in WooCommerce?
Smart Coupons has a dedicated feature for this. Simply navigate to Marketing > Coupons in your dashboard and click the ‘Bulk Generate’ tab. From there, you can generate thousands of unique coupon codes at once with all the necessary restrictions and limits.
