Offering a voucher package for one of your products can impact your sales and customer loyalty.
One of our e-commerce partners is selling classes online, and recently wanted to introduce a voucher product that is worth 10 individual classes, paid in advance. Although the usecase is the same as for any physical product.
The native options
The idea is simple, incentivize customers to buy in advance to increase their loyalty, but leave it up to them to decide when to use it. But how could this be implemented in Shopify. Well natively, we have to options:
- Gift cards
- Discount coupons
Let’s look at gift cards first:
They are a great way to bind customers to the store, and are great for refunds. Unfortunately, we currently can’t limit them to specific products in Shopify. Thus, a gift card could be used for anything. Also, there is no way to denominate them in terms of products as opposed to a monetary value. Example: 10x product 1 instead of 10×50$=500$ monetary value. Not so ideal if the price of our product changes.
How about discount coupons:
In Shopify, we have multiple types of discounts. The most fitting would be the ‘Amount off products’.
Thus, we can limit the discount to only the one product we want the voucher to be for. Also we can limit the number of allowed usage to 10. Perfect – almost.
We then have two options:
- Fixed amount off
- Percentage off
Fixed amount also runs into the problem above as soon as the price of the product changes. But there is another one:
The discount will only apply once per order. If we want to use a voucher on 2 physical products, we have to create two separate orders. That’s complicated and might increase shipping costs.
The percentage of 100% is bad in the exact opposite direction. There is no limit how many of these products will be discounted in one order. The customer could get 100 products free with just a voucher of one product.
Conclusion
Now you are an expert on both native types. Unfortunately, as you could notice, there is no native feature that works in this use case. This has been requested by many merchants online many times before, so we chose to find a solution ourselves.
The solution for a voucher
We created CustomerCards, a Shopify App specifically for this use case. Try it out today.
After installation the process is straightforward. We just select ‘New prepaid package’
Now we just need to enter the voucher name, price, count and a discount of 100% to the applied product.
It will even automatically generate a simple buyable voucher product as well, although you can choose to create one yourself.
Bonus
The discount will be linked to the account and be applied automatically at checkout, without the customer having to search for the gift card and coupon code. It will discount as many products in the customers cart as there are vouchers available.