Promotional codes
You need: Promotional codes — view to browse, Promotional codes — edit to create or change anything.
Promotional codes are organised as campaigns that generate coupons. Getting that relationship right makes the rest of the screen obvious.
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Promotional code | The rule: what the discount is, when it is valid |
| Campaign | A promotional code plus the set of coupons generated from it |
| Coupon | One individual code a customer actually enters |
A campaign is created with its first coupon. You then add further coupons to it as needed.
Browsing
The main list supports filters and pagination. From a campaign you can open its generated coupons — the individual codes — and see or edit them one at a time.
Active offers is a separate view: the offers currently live for a given store, with the detail of any one of them. Use it to answer "what can this store actually offer right now", which is not the same question as "what campaigns exist".
Creating
| To create | Use |
|---|---|
| A standalone promotional code | Create promotional code |
| A campaign, with its first coupon | Create campaign |
| Another coupon on an existing campaign | Add coupon |
Create the campaign first, then add coupons to it. Creating separate codes that were meant to be one campaign leaves you unable to manage them together afterwards.
Editing
Two different edits, at two levels:
- The promotional code — its dates, renewal day, and the times it is valid.
- A single generated coupon — one specific code within a campaign.
Editing the code changes the rule for the campaign. Editing a coupon changes one customer-facing code. If a customer reports a problem with one code, the coupon is usually the right level.
Expiring versus deleting
This is the decision that matters most, and the two are not interchangeable.
| Expire | Delete | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Sets the end date to today — the code stops working from now | Removes the campaign and its coupons entirely |
| Redeemed coupons | Fine — history is preserved | Blocked. Will not proceed if any coupon has been redeemed |
| Reversible | The record still exists | No |
| Use when | A live campaign should stop | A campaign was created in error and never used |
Expiring is almost always the right answer. It stops the campaign while keeping the record of what happened, which is what you need when a customer asks why their code stopped working.
There is also a bulk expire, which marks every coupon of a campaign as used in one go. Use it to close a campaign out completely rather than letting unredeemed coupons linger.
Deleting a campaign is the operation described under "apply bulk changes" on this screen — a naming overlap that means something different everywhere else in Marketing. Read How bulk changes work before using it.
If a customer's code doesn't work
Check in this order:
- Is the campaign still within its dates? Including the valid times, not just the days.
- Has that specific coupon already been redeemed? Open the generated coupons and look.
- Is the offer live for that store? Check active offers for that store — a campaign can exist without being offered everywhere.
- Was it bulk-expired? A campaign closed out has all its coupons marked used.
Related pages
- Importing promotional codes — loading codes from a file
- How bulk changes work — before any bulk operation here
- Personal promotions — for offers attached to specific customers instead