Coupon Discounting on Shopify Cart - Why & How?

Discounting is an integral part of ecommerce marketing. 

While you can give straight forward discounting directly on your pricing, Coupons get a psychological advantage on boosting the conversion rate. 

Multiple studies on ecommerce pricing strategy have shown that discount codes significantly boosts conversion rates.

Problems of discounting on checkout

Shopify lets you create any type of discount codes you probably need. However, your customers can apply a discount code only when they reach on the checkout step. This limits the power of discount codes significantly!

Why? Here are the reasons:

1. Most of the abandonement happens on the cart page itself, before the customer reaches the checkout.

2. Let's say a customer has reached the checkout page, filled all the contact details, address etc. Then applies a discount code. But sheesh! The coupon code turns out to be invalid for some reason! How disappointing is that?

It’s highly likely that the customer will abandon the checkout to go back to find the coupon code or fulfill the coupon conditions like minimum purchase amount.

What’s the solution?

The only way to stop the checkout abandonment is to let the customers apply and coupon code on the cart page to redeem the discount.

Benefits of coupon discounting on cart:

i) Reduced cart abandonment. When a customer  applies a discount coupon on a cart, they are most likely to go to the checkout. Statistics from VoucherCloud show that 57% of buyers are more likely to complete a first-time purchase when they can redeem a coupon. And when there’s no discount, customers would abandon their carts.

ii) Improved AOV (Average order value): Along with the coupon code field, showing right coupons on Shopify cart page improves the average order value significantly.

iii) Seamless checkout experience: While applying a coupon code on the cart page, if the cart items or the amount doesn’t match the coupon conditions, the customers will be able to easily update their cart to get the discount. 

How to show the coupon code on the Shopify cart page?

i) Option -1: Using a custom code in your cart liquid

Shopify doesn’t have any default option to add the discount field on the cart page.

However if you are confident enough to play with the Shopify liquid codes, and don’t break anything on your store, you can try this code. 

ii) Option - 2: Using an App

Don’t worry if you are not an Shopify code expert, there are multiple Shopify apps which let you create the coupon discount field on the cart page.

However, showing the discount field is double effective when you show available coupon codes on the cart page. This way if the customer doesn’t have a code or forgot the code she got from a promotion, can easily select and use the code. 

Voila Shopify App Lets you do exactly that. With this app you get the options to create:

i) A coupon field on the cart page where your customers can use any valid coupon code they have.

ii) A link to a pop-up where you can show all the available coupons for the customers.

This makes it really easy for your customers to get the discount before checkout and creates a hassle free shopping experience.

Also read: 4 Shopify Cart Optimization Tips Which You Can Implement Right Away