Coupon codes are a great way to engage your current audience and prospective customers by offering discounts on products and subscription plans on your site.

Once you have your products and/or subscription plans set up, you can easily discount these and share the coupon codes with your audience.

Creating a new coupon

Here's how to create a new coupon in Podia:

From your Podia dashboard, click on Sales > Coupons in the sidebar menu to get started with creating a coupon on Podia.
Click on New coupon in the upper right corner.
Fill in the details for your coupon, such as name, amount, etc.
Once you're done, click Create coupon to finish creating your coupon code.

Here are all of the available options when creating a new coupon code:

Coupon details

Coupon code

Give your coupon code a name.

If you are using a coupon code for a public event (e.g. Black Friday sales), use a descriptive coupon code like BLACKFRIDAY-2020 or HALLOWEEN-50OFF.

Alternatively, you can also click on Generate unique code to use a unique coupon code that can be shared with your customers to access your site, product and/or subscription plan discounts.

Only alpha-numeric characters are accepted for coupon codes and any special characters will be removed, with spaces converted to dashes (-).

Discounted items

You are able to choose between 4 different coupon types based on how you want to apply the discounts across your products and subscription plans on your site.

The 4 coupon types you can choose from are listed below:

All products and plans: This coupon type will allow you to discount all available products and plans in your store. All future products and plans added to the store will also be discounted.
Community plans only: This coupon type will apply the specified discount to all available plans on your site.
Specific products: This coupon type will allow you to search and add specific online courses, digital downloads, webinars, community plans, and bundles to apply the discount.

Please note: any coupon that is created with the intent to be used for a subscription plan will be applied to the invoice each month (e.g. if your plan is $10/month and you provide a $5 off coupon, the plan will now be $5/month for the lifetime of the subscription)

Discount value

There are two types of value you can assign to coupons:

Percentage (%): This is the most popular coupon value (with over 70% of the coupons) used for products and plans. This value type will allow you to discount a percentage of your plans or products, thus providing more control over your discounts.
Amount: An amount discount allows you to specify a specific amount to discount from your product or plans. If multiple products or subscription plans are selected for a coupon, this amount will apply to all the selected products and plans for that coupon.

📝 When using a coupon with multiple products and/or plans, a percentage (%) value will allow you to have more control over the discounted amount for both products and plans.

Amount discounts, on the other hand, work better with specific products where the price is static, and there aren't multiple variants with regard to monthly or annual subscriptions, as in the case of plans.

Coupon options

Under coupon options, you’ll be able to add limits on the number of times a coupon can be used or redeemed on your site or set up an expiry date for your coupons.

Limit Uses

Coupons in Podia can be set with unlimited usage or with a specific usage limit, depending on how you want to control them.

Limiting uses will allow you to add limits on the total number of times a coupon can be used or redeemed on your site.

These limits are NOT specific to any particular customer account but are related to its TOTAL USES.

This means that an individual customer could potentially use a coupon code with a use limit more than once, depending upon your other coupon settings.

Depending on how the coupons are set up, some customers may be able to use coupons across various products and/or plans and have multiple coupon usages or redemptions associated with a single customer.

When a member uses a coupon to sign up for a subscription plan, the discount will automatically apply to every billing cycle of that plan—whether it’s monthly or yearly. This means the discount repeats each time they are billed, but the coupon itself only counts as being “used” once at the time of checkout.

Expiry

To set an expiry date on coupons, you can use one of the preset expiry times, or select a date and time from the date and time dropdown.

After a coupon’s expiration date, new customers will no longer be able to redeem it at checkout. However, if the coupon has already been applied—such as to an active subscription—it will remain valid and continue to apply to future billing cycles.

FAQs

Is there any other way to offer discounts in Podia?

At this time, using coupon codes would be the only way to create discounts in Podia.

How do coupons work for subscriptions?

Any coupon created for a subscription will automatically apply to each recurring invoice. For example, if your plan costs $10/month and you issue a $5 off coupon, the subscriber will pay $5/month for the lifetime of the subscription.

Can I offer a discount just for one month of a subscription/community plan?

At this time, coupons created with the intent to be used for a subscription plan will be applied to the invoice each month, for as long as the subscription is active.

Can I use a coupon to offer a free month on my subscription/community plan?

No, coupons created with the intent to be used for a subscription plan will be applied to the invoice each month, for as long as the subscription is active.

To offer a free month, you could instead consider adding free trial days to your community plan!