What are discount codes and when would I use them?
Discount codes are an easy way for event organiser to give discounts to a restricted set of registrants. One possible use of this field is if a club is organizing a race and wants to offer a discount to members of their own club. In this case they would set a discount code and then distribute that code among their members (usually via email). When the members enter the correct code they get the applicable discount.
Types of Discounts
There are three different types of discounts that you can set. These are;
- Percent Discount: This discounts the registrants fees by the specified %. So 100% would mean a %100 discount or “Free”.
- Fixed Discount: This deducts a set amount from the total fees that a registrant owes.
- Only Pay Amount: This means that the registrant will pay only the fee specified in the discount code no matter what he owes before entering the code.
Adding a Discount Code to your Form
At the bottom of the Edit Form page, click the Add a Form Element button, and select the Discount Code field type. You may have to click the Create a Custom Element button at the bottom of the Add a Form Element window to find the discount code field type.
This will take you to a window where you can set the field label (usually this should be something like “Enter your discount code here”, but it’s up to you) and then you can create as many discount codes as you like. It’s up to you to set what the code is, it’s not auto-generated by our system, so you can choose something that is memorable or references your event sponsors.
When you’ve created all the discount codes you need to, click the save button at the bottom. If you need to add more discount codes later, edit this discount code field to get back to this screen.
Experimental Advanced Discount Code Features
September 2018 – Zone4 has been working on a new set of features to enhance the discount code concept. The 3 new features are:
- Creating Codes that only apply to certain fee fields
- Quantity Limits on the usage of specific discount codes
- The ability for registrants to stack or use multiple discount codes on the same registration.
As these features are still very experimental and require testing on behalf of clubs, Zone4 only enables the features publicly upon request. To explore these new feature, for now, you can only configure them by going back to the old form editor using the … menu and “Go back to the old editor”
If you are inserting a new discount code field, click Insert where you want the field to go, and click Discount Code. Otherwise click Edit on an existing discount code field. Note the Individual level can only have 1 discount code field on it.
When editing discount codes, you will see 3 buttons for the 3 different types of discount codes you can apply: Percentage %, Pay Set Amount, or Deduct Set Amount.
Click The “Add Percentage % Discount Code” button to bring up the following dialog.
Enter the % Off such as 25 for a 25% Off discount.
The Code is what the registrant will type in to get this discount. It can be whatever you like, but should be memorable and not easily guessable.
The Description should be a short text describing what fields this code applies to. This description will be shown to registrants after they type in the code.
Quantity, if you want to limit the number of times the code is used. Leave blank if no limit is desired.
Select which fees the code applies to. Either select “** All Fees **” or select the checkboxes corresponding to the fee fields this code applies to.
When you click “Add Discount Code” it adds the entry to your list. Note that you cannot edit the Applies To fee fields after you add the code and once your registration is live, the Code and Amount fields will also no longer be editable. You can however always edit the Quantity field so removing a code is as simple as entering 0 for Quantity.
The ability to have one discount code that applies to one set of fees (such as race fees) and another code that applies to another set of fees (such as trail passes) created the need to allow multiple codes to be applied to the same individual. The public implementation of this feature now handles this concept by applying whichever code would grant the registrant the highest benefit. So for instance if they had two codes, one for 10% off all fees, and a 2nd code for 25% off the race fees, the system will use the 25% discount on the race fee fields, but then use the 10% on the remaining non-race fee fields. So the key thing to note is that it does not add 25%+10% or try to compound them, it just picks the higher of the two.