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How to Set up and Accept Coupons

Coupons, like other discounts (and everything shopping cart related), are set up using Mal’s E-Commerce.

Log into your Mal’s E-commerce account at https://www.mals-e.com/.

From the admin page click on ‘Cart setup’.

To the left you’ll see a bunch of options — click on ‘Discounts’. Appropriately, look for the big dollar sign.

This will present you with two options — ‘Discount tables’ and ‘Discount coupons’. To set up a coupon you’ll choose ‘Discount coupons’.

Here’s the coupon screen. It lists your current coupons (if any) and allows you to set up new ones.

Say you want to offer a coupon to customers who read your blog, and you want to offer them 25% off of any order over $50. It’ll be an ongoing coupon so you don’t want an expiration date. You decide to keep it easy to remember and call it ‘BLOG25′. You’d set it up like this:

You accidentally send a customer the wrong thing, and in addition to apologizing and replacing it with the right item, you decide to offer them 15% off of any single future purchase as well. ‘OOPS15′ seems like a good name:

Your newsletter subscribers are a good bunch of people, loyal and frequent customers. You decide to offer then $10 off of any order over $50, but only until your next newsletter comes out in the beginning of February. You don’t much care what the coupon is called, so you leave that box blank:

You’re trying a new advertising campaign, and you decide to use free shipping to lure customers and to tell you how effective the new campaign is. ‘FREESHIP’ seems like a nice easy code for new customers to remember:

Mal’s offers a lot of flexibility in coupons — heck, I got a couple of promo ideas just writing this tutorial.

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