Working with Coupons

Coupons are a powerful tool for handling special exceptions in your pricing policy for individual backers.

Common use cases include:

• Providing a special discount to a reviewer
• Offering an extra discount to a retailer (on top of your general retailer settings)
• Rewarding winners of giveaways or social media competitions

Instead of manually assigning hard-coded credits, coupons give you a proper digital record of each discount. This makes future support much easier—no more wondering, “Why does this backer have an extra $15?” or “Why did this backer pay only $X instead of $Y?”

👉 Note: If your goal is to assign mass freebies or credits (for example, Early Bird bonuses, loyalty rewards, or bulk VIP credits), those should not be handled with coupons. Please see this article for detailed instructions on using the Upload Freebies & Credits function.

You can create and manage your coupons from the "Coupons" tab of your project.

To create a new coupon use the relevant form found in the page. Below you can see a description of the functionality of each field in the form:

• Discount Amount. This will be a flat amount that will be deducted from the total balance of the backer's pledge. Our system does not support percentages for coupons. A coupon with a percentage amount can easily be abused by the user and can result in a huge loss of money (e.g. if used by a Group Order, or a Retailer). It is much safer to give coupons of specific amounts, so you always know the final discount amount.
• For Specific Addon. In this field you can select one specific addon from your project. When you do so, this coupon (even if added to the pledge) will not apply the discount unless the specific add-on is added to the backer's pledge. This is a very useful functionality if you want to give to someone a discount for a specific add-on.
• Free Shipping. When you check this flag, the coupon will zero the total shipping cost for the backer's pledge.
• Note. This is a great way to keep some information on the reason you created this specific coupon. Doing so will help you remember in the future why you gave each discount. For example it could be a note with the name of the person you are giving the coupon or something like "Discount for a review copy", or "Free Shipping to big retailer", or anything else that will help you remember in the future the reasoning behind the creation of this coupon.
• Count. This field should be an integer positive value declaring the amount of coupons the system should generate, using the 

Once you have created new coupons for your project you will see a list of them in this page.

For each coupon you will be able to see the following information:

• Coupon Code. This is the code you need to communicate to your backer. They will need to add it to their pledge by clicking the relevant "Add Coupon" button.
• Discount. The discount amount you set for this coupon.
• Free Shipping. Whether the coupon will award free shipping to the backer or not.
• Addon. If you have selected an addon that needs to be added for the coupon to take effect, you will see it in this column.
• Note. The custom note you added for this coupon.
• Assigned. This is a field that you control manually. You should use the button "Change Status" to toggle this field. The best use of this field is to check it when you actually send the email to the backer with their coupon. If you created multiple coupons, you will need to send multiple emails, every time you send one use the "Change Status" button to mark the coupon code you just emailed. That way you will know which ones you have already used, and which ones are free to be used.
• Redeemed? This is a field that is controlled by our system. When the backer actually uses this coupon, you will see the date time and their email in this column. If no such information is filled, then you know that the backer has not used the coupon yet. In this case you may want to remind them of the fact.

You can export all the information of the coupons you have created for your project by using the button "Export Coupons" at the top of the page.

You will want to do that at least in the two cases below:

• If you mass-generated multiple coupons, this is an easy way to get a CSV with all the coupon codes. You can then feed that CSV to an email generator(using a template) so that you can send multiple emails with them to your backers.
• After the end of the project, using the "Export Backers" functionality in the "Backers" tab, will give you all the information we collected from your backers, including the coupons they may have used. But, that information will not include the coupons that have not be used/redeemed by your backers. To get that information and keep it in your records you will need to use the "Export Coupons" button.

Our platform does not support the generation of one coupon code that can be used by multiple backers. This practice is not compatible with the crowd-funding culture, and can result in many unforeseen issues.

For example, let's say you go at a convention and print a flyer with that code, then someone gets it and posts it online. The next thing that will happen is that you will have hundreds of backers coming back to you, complaining (rightfully), asking for the same discount, re-opening their pledges adding the coupon and asking for refunds! This is a VERY valid argument, and it will definitely harm your reputation within the crowd-funding community.

That said, you can work around this by creating single use coupons, that are given to specific visitors for performing certain tasks. Now, the promo is not generic and for everyone, but rather personalized and specific, tied to a certain activity performed at the convention (for example play a demo of the game).

If you want to generate such flyers (with a unique coupon code on them), there are several ways you can do so.

Option 1

• You print your flyer and leave a space on it for a sticker with the unique code.
• You generate multiple coupon codes within our platform and export them in Excel.
• You print on a sticker sheet the codes, and then attach one on each flyer.

Option 2

• You generate multiple coupons within our platform and export them in Excel.
• You give the Excel to your printer and the template of your flyer. They will most definitely have a process on printing the numbers on them.