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Creating coupons and promotions

You can apply dollar discounts to individual line items but not to a final sales total. You can create coupon items to subtract an amount from an entire sale.

To create coupon items

  1. From the main menu, click Inventory > New Item.
  2. Create a new item and from the Type drop-down, select Non-Inventory.
  3. Give the item a relevant description such as $5 off coupon or Summer Sale coupon and click Save Changes.
  4. Give this item a negative price point such as $-5.00 or -5 and make it non-taxable.
  5. Add this item to any sale that you want the discount applied to. It won't be displayed in the Discounts area of your sale, but the Total will be correct.

To create buy-one-get-one promotions

For buy-one-get-one promotions where the discount depends on the price of the free item, you create a coupon item, but leave the price at $0.00. In the register, when this item is rung up Lightspeed Retail will prompt you to input a price and you can put a negative amount equal to the free item.

NOTE: This has some security concerns, as associates who aren't allowed to add discounts can add any negative amount here so only use this item if you trust your employees. You can always require a PIN before each sale and look at sales history of the coupon items.

To do reporting on coupons

To see how much money you've discounted using coupons, search for the coupon item in the INVENTORY section, then click the Sales section in the left menu to see a subtotal of how much money you've discounted.

If you create a new product category for coupon items, named Coupons or Discounts, you can search your reports for this specific category. This is an excellent idea if you want to create different items for different promotions.

To market your coupons and promotions

Lightspeed Retail generates a system ID and a matching barcode for every item created, including Non-Inventory items such as coupons and promotions.You can use this to your advantage a few different ways.

  • Print a label for this item like you would normally. You can keep this label on an index card or cheat sheet at the register, so you and your associates can easily add the item to the sale.
  • Design and print an actual coupon for your promotion, and cut out and add the barcode from this label to the design. Make copies and pass them out to your customers.
  • If you create a coupon design with a printed barcode, you can use a flatbed scanner and save it as an image. Use our Mailchimp integration to email the coupon to subscribers to your email newsletter. They can print the coupon and bring it into your shop and all you have to do is scan it.

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