Promo Codes: From Newsletter Reward to Influencer Tracking
You’ve been growing a newsletter. You want to thank your subscribers with 10% off their next ticket. Or you’ve struck a deal with three Instagram creators and want to know which one is actually driving sales.
Until now you’d have done both with hidden tickets — clone the regular ticket at a lower price, share the hidden URL. That works for two or three; it doesn’t scale to “different code per influencer” and it doesn’t tell you what got redeemed.
Promo codes are now live. Buyers type them at checkout, or you append ?promo=NEWS10 to any link and they auto-apply.
What you can configure
Each code carries five things you choose:
- Type & amount — percentage (1–100%) or a fixed amount in your account’s currency
- Event scope — restrict to a single event, or leave open across all events
- Expiry — optional datetime after which the code stops applying
- Total usage cap — total redemptions across all buyers
- Per-customer cap — max redemptions per buyer email
That last one matters. Set max_per_customer: 1 and your “first-time buyer 10% off” code can’t be reused by the same person across orders. Refunded orders free up the slot automatically.
Two ways buyers redeem
Typed at checkout. Right above the payment buttons there’s a “Have a promo code?” disclosure. Open it, type, apply. The cart total updates immediately — Turbo handles the live UI without a page reload.
?promo=CODE URL. Append it to any link on your shop. Usetix captures it into the buyer’s session; by the time they reach checkout the discount is already applied. The disclosure opens automatically showing “Applied: NEWS10”. Perfect for newsletter, ad, and influencer links.
Codes that don’t match are silently ignored on the public shop — no scary error before the buyer has even decided to buy.
What happens behind the scenes
The discount is allocated across the order’s line items proportionally. The hosted Stripe Checkout page shows the discounted unit prices, so the buyer sees the real numbers. PayPal validates against the discounted total. A 100%-off code routes the order through the free-checkout path — no payment provider involved.
VAT is computed on the discounted total. Your customer invoice reads truthfully: line items at the discounted price, a “Promo code” line, then Net / VAT / Total below.
Influencer tracking, the simple way
Give each partner a unique code: MARIA15, ALEX15, JANE15. The order list shows the redeemed code on every order — so you can sort by code at the end of the month and see exactly what each partner drove. Combined with UTM tracking, you can also see which platform (utm_source) brought the click.
No third-party affiliate tool, no link-shortener. Just a code per partner.
Refunds, races, and edge cases
The usage limit is a soft cap. Under high concurrency on a near-capacity code, a few orders may slip past. Hard locking would strand buyers in Stripe’s async payment window. Soft over-redemption is the correct call.
Refunds don’t decrement redemptions_count. If you give out 100 free coupons and a few are refunded, you don’t want those slots to silently come back. If you do want more redemptions, edit the code and bump the limit.
Codes with redemptions can’t be hard-deleted — they soft-deactivate instead, so order history keeps the snapshot of which code was used and what discount applied. Receipts and invoices remain truthful even after the code is gone from the admin view.
In the admin & in the AI
A new Promo codes section in the sidebar — full CRUD, list view with usage counters, soft-delete-when-redeemed.
The in-app AI assistant knows about promo codes too: “Create a code FALL26, 15% off, max 1 per customer, expires end of October” sets it up. “List my active codes” gives you the rundown. “Deactivate ALEX15” turns it off without losing history.
API & webhooks
Full CRUD on /admin/promo_codes via the API. The order webhook payload (order.paid) now includes discount_amount, promo_code, and original_price per item — so your CRM or accounting integration can reconstruct the full picture.
Try it now
Promo codes are live for all accounts. Read the full guide: Promo codes docs.
Questions? [email protected].