The Coupon feature allows you to use coupons to associate orders with affiliates, so even if the customer doesn't click an affiliate link but uses a coupon code belonging to an affiliate this affiliate will get a commission.
It also allows tracking offline sales from offline marketing via these coupons.
To use this feature you need to activate the "Coupons and Offline Sales" feature in the Merchant panel under Configuration in the Features section.
- this feature does not provide the coupon recognition capability itself to your shopping cart so if your shopping cart does not support discount codes this feature won't work for you.
- if a coupon code associated with an affiliate is used, then both the Affiliate and Campaign will be recognized based on the coupon. Therefore the product ID matching will be ignored. If you wish to still use the product ID matching then disable campaign recognition in the configuration of this feature.
Create new Coupons banner
The Coupon type of banner allows you to create new coupons in the Merchant panel at Banners->Banner manager->Add banner->Coupon.
When creating a new coupon you need to specify:
- Name - name of the coupon banner (e.g. 10% discount coupon)
- Campaign - campaign to which this coupon will belong
- Description - detailed description of the coupon (e.g. how it can be used, what advantages does it give to the customers, ...)
- Maximum coupons per affiliate - This setting specifies how many coupon codes an affiliate can have. It is useful especially when coupons can be used only once and you do not want one affiliate to grab all the codes.
Import or Generate the actual coupon codes
After you have created the banner you will need to Import or Generate the actual coupon codes as described in their respective articles. Please follow the links to read more.
Design the coupon
Now, when you have your coupons in the system, you should prepare them for the affiliates - in the Design tab you can specify how will it look like. If you plan to use the coupons only for online promotion you don't really need to design it.
On the other hand if you plan to prepare coupons for offline promotion so your affiliates can actually hand out the coupons on conferences you design a nice material using HTML code and CSS styling. You can also incorporate barcodes or QR codes to the coupon so you can enter it into the Offline sale dialog more easily. The design defined here will be used in the affiliates' panel, in the banners section and also for printing.
The affiliate will see the coupon codes under Promotion->Banners&Links like this: