Discounts allow you to reduce the price of products and subscriptions for your customers. They can be applied at checkout or via the API.

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Types of Discounts

Flowglad supports two types of discounts based on how the reduction is calculated:

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Percentage Discounts

A percentage reduction off the original price. For example:

  • 10% off
  • 25% off
  • 50% off

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Fixed Amount Discounts

A specific monetary amount deducted from the original price. This amount is stored as an integer (e.g., cents for USD, pence for GBP). For example:

  • $10.00 off
  • £20.00 off
  • €15.50 off

Fixed discount amounts are stored in the smallest unit of a given currency, e.g. in cents for USD.

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Creating Discounts

You can create discounts from the Discounts page in your dashboard:

  1. Click the “New Discount” button.
  2. Fill out the discount details:
    • Name: A descriptive name for internal reference (e.g., “Summer Sale 2024”).
    • Code: The code customers will enter at checkout. Must be between 3 and 20 characters. It will be automatically converted to uppercase (e.g., SUMMER20).
    • Amount Type: Choose Percentage or Fixed Amount.
    • Amount: The numeric value for the discount (e.g., 10 for 10% or 1000 for $10.00).
    • Duration: Specify how long the discount applies, especially for subscriptions (see details below).
    • Number of Payments: Only required if Duration is set to Number of Payments. Specifies how many billing cycles the discount applies to.
    • Active: Controls whether the discount code can be redeemed. Defaults to true.

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Discount Duration

When creating a discount, particularly for subscriptions, you must specify its duration:

  • Once: The discount is applied only to the initial payment of a purchase or subscription.
  • Forever: The discount is applied to all recurring payments for the entire lifetime of the subscription.
  • Number of Payments: The discount is applied for a specific number of billing periods (e.g., for the first 3 months of a monthly subscription). You must provide the exact number of payments when selecting this option.

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Managing Discounts

From the Discounts page, you can:

  • View all your created discount codes.
  • See how many times each code has been redeemed (coming soon!).
  • Edit the details of existing discounts.
  • Toggle the Active status to enable or disable codes.
  • Delete discounts that haven’t been redeemed yet.

Deactivating or deleting a discount code that has already been applied to active subscriptions will not remove the discount from those existing subscriptions. They will continue as per the original discount’s terms.

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Best Practices

  • Use clear, memorable, and relatively short discount codes.
  • Deactivate promotional codes once the promotion ends.
  • Consider the financial impact of Forever discounts on subscription revenue.
  • Monitor discount usage patterns to inform future promotions.
  • Always test your discount codes in a staging or test environment before sharing them publicly.

Create unique discount codes for different marketing campaigns or channels (e.g., NEWSLETTER10, PODCAST15) to track their performance effectively.