Educational discounts are a great way to incentivize sales from students, who typically are strapped for cash. If you run a WooCommerce website, here's a great/simple method to set up a bulletproof student discount system.
The beauty about offering a student discount is that everybody in university will have a .edu email address to use. To verify that there is student, we're not going to need to pay any external service to verify this for us, all we want is for a student to sign up with their .edu email address, verify that that email exists, and then offer them a custom coupon. The first thing to do is have all of your customers verify their email before being able to purchase on your shop.
This make sure the person who is registering actually has access to their email. If we didn't set up the customer verification, the student discount for WooCommerce products would still work, but anybody could be able to enter a .edu email address, purchase a product, and then change the email address to their real one after using the applicable coupon. This is just to minimize abuse of your discount.
To do this, there's a very simple plugin that sends a standard email address verification link after the user registers on the platform.
If you only want this to apply to students registering with a .edu email address, and disable this verification for everybody else, streamlining the process and probably leading to more conversions, you can do that by creating a new user type specific to students, and then only enabling the verification for that individual user role. Here’s a tutorial on that.
Once we have the verification system in place, it's time to add the actual coupon which will enable the customer discount specific for students. To do this, it's quite easy. First, create a new coupon using the default WooCommerce coupon method. Set up the number of uses, percentage discount, and everything else in a standard way. Then, under the usage restrictions tab, simply paste in the following:
You can also limit the coupon to the student role by using Smart Coupons:
James LePage is the founder of Isotropic Design, a digital agency that builds WordPress websites. I read, write and design constantly!
