WooCommerce Store Credit - How to Create, Best Plugin, Use Cases

You assign a monetary value as a credit to the customer. So the customer uses that credit to make purchases until the credit is exhausted or its validity expires. This is store credit.

You can also call store credit as a gift card, WooCommerce gift voucher, account fund, gift certificate. These are all essentially the same thing.

Why store credit is a necessity and not just a feature?

Because:

Store credit can compensate for a refund and retain customers
It encourages repeat purchases
Attracts new customers as well as loyal customers
Generate revenue in advance of sales

Although the default WooCommerce system doesn’t provide you with the option to create store credit, several plugins can add this functionality to your store.

And the most popular WooCommerce store credit plugin is WooCommerce Smart Coupons by StoreApps.

Using Smart Coupons plugin, you can create and send store credit to your customers. OR Your customers can buy store-credit for themselves to make purchases later on your store.

How to create a store credit in WooCommerce?

Creating store credit using Smart Coupons is similar to creating a coupon in WooCommerce.

You can create and issue a store credit of any amount. We’ll first see how to create a simple store credit having a validity which you can issue to your customers.

Steps:

Go to WP Admin panel > Marketing > Coupons > Add coupon
Give it a description for your reference
Go to the General tab
Under Discount type, select Store Credit/Gift Certificate.
Enter the amount, say $50 and set the expiry date to Jun 30, 2020.
Now, Smart Coupons gives you this excellent feature to set the exact time of the credit expiry and whether to issue this store credit to new users only.
Publish the coupon

That’s it. You have created a store credit. Copy the store credit code and share it with relevant customers.

Whenever they add any product to cart, they can use this code and redeem the store credit. Simple, right?

Another thing, Smart Coupons also gives you the option to restrict the above store credit to a particular email address.

As shown in the above image, under Usage restriction > Allowed emails, enter the email address for the store credit to get applied. This is to not allow misuse and only the concerned person can redeem the credit.

You can also bulk generate store credit and send to relevant customers. Learn how to create WooCommerce coupons in bulk.

And if you want to know how to set-up store credits (gift cards for WooCommerce) your customers can buy from you, refer these steps.

Sending store credit to customers via email

This is also very easy using Smart Coupons. This if you want to quickly send store credit having no expiry only to a few customers.

Here are the steps:

Go to WP Admin panel > Marketing > Coupons and click on the Send Store Credit tab
Under Send to, enter the email addresses of people you want to send the store credit
Under Worth, enter the store credit amount, say $50
You can also add a message to personalize your email
Click on Send

All those customers whose email addresses you have entered will receive $50 store credit.

Logged-in users can check their store credit code/balance in the My Account > Coupons.

As store credit is restricted to the user’s email address, it will show up on the cart/checkout page. The user just has to click to apply it.

Hence, instead of juggling around with default WooCommerce coupon settings and code, make your life easier by using this WooCommerce credits plugin.

Get Smart Coupons plugin

Nine best WooCommerce store credit applications to boost sales

These are some smart ways to use store credit on your WooCommerce store using Smart Coupons.

Issue credits to special customers on birthdays / Christmas

This could arguably one of the best WooCommerce store credit applications. Make customers delighted. Smart Coupons give you two awesome features – bulk generation and scheduling.

Say you have some 50 very loyal customers. You can bulk generate credits and schedule them for these customers before Christmas. They will receive it automatically before Christmas and can redeem during Christmas week.

So no need to create an individual coupon for each customer and wait for 24th December to send the credits.

Let customers purchase a higher value store credit at a lower price

A smart way to earn money in advance. Consider you are offering a $500 store credit at just $400.

This is an indirect way of offering a discount of 20%. The best part of this is you are earning a high-end customer.

Here are the steps to set-up high value store credit at a low price.

Keep using credits until they expire

Again, another benefit for customers. They can use it as per their choice.
Say your customer has a total store credit of $100. The customer purchased products worth $49 today and $29 a week later.

So instead of paying money, the customer redeemed from their store credit balance for the respective products. This still leaves them with $22 credit.

And if the cart total exceeds store credit, the remaining amount can be paid using other payment methods.

Use as an alternative to refunds

As mentioned at the start, store credit is a great way to reduce refunds.

We know refund hurts. But they are unavoidable. But instead of refunds, you can issue a store credit of the same amount of that of refunds.

This is to make sure that the customer stays with your brand for longer. And using that credit, customer can make another purchase.

For example, businesses that sells courses, bookings and others…you can issue a gift card or store credit equivalent to the refund amount on cancellation, which users can redeem later. Here’s how to set it up.

However, not all customers will agree, but some will. Then why not give it a try?

Reward recent customers with a short-term validity store credit

Recent customers are more likely to purchase again. So why not attract them with something they like?

In this case, you can email a store credit having a validity of 1 month to your recent customers (say acquired within three months). The urgency of credit getting expired will nudge customers to make a purchase.

Restrict store credit to specific products, categories, payment methods…

You want to give a discount but not overspend at the same time. So Smart Coupons offer you great functionality and that is restriction.

You don’t want your customers to redeem the store credit on the purchase of your best sellers. You can do that easily.

Similarly, you don’t want store credit to get applied if the payment method is Cash On Delivery or Shipping method is Flat Rate.

Use store-credit as a discount to eliminate shipping costs

No one likes charges on free shipping even if it is 100 cents.

But if customers have a store credit, they can redeem that on shipping charges and make it eligible for free shipping.

Apply store-credit before taxes

Now when you redeem any coupon at food outlets or shopping malls, the taxes are calculated on the final amount after deducting the coupon voucher. Right? The same goes here.

You can set the store credit to apply before levying tax on the final amount.

This is also good from your customer’s point of view because they will pay a little less amount.

For example:

The tax is 10% on overall value and you have $100 credit.
Consider your order total as $1000.
Now if you first add tax and then deduct store credit, it turns out to be $1000.
However, if you deduct store credit first and then apply tax, it turns out to be $990. (That’s a $10 savings)

Allow store credit in combination with other coupons or individually

You want to make the deal sweeter. So you can allow store credit to get applied along with other coupons.

On the other hand, you don’t want to overspend. You can restrict other coupons from getting applied except the store credit.

Only store-credit plugin or all-in-one coupon solution?

Now, there are some plugins out there that only give you store-credit functionality.

But Smart Coupons offers tons of possibilities beyond store-credit:

One-click coupon application
Restrict coupons based on attributes
Restrict coupons based on location, payment methods, taxonomy, email address
Set maximum discount limit on percentage coupons (40% Off upto $40)
URL coupons
Issue product as a free gift using coupons
Schedule coupons for delivery
Compatible with WooCommerce Subscriptions

and a lot more…

So, an all-in-one coupon solution is a better option for lifetime sales, right?

If you agree, Smart Coupons is for you.

Get Smart Coupons plugin

Conclusion

That’s quite a lot on store credit. It’s the need of the day. If you don’t implement it on your store now, your sales will fall.

So don’t give a second thought. Implement it now on your store.

And if you want to grow sales regularly, look nowhere than Smart Coupons.