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How to create discount codes

Last updated January 29, 2025

With Hotplate, you can easily create codes to give your customers either a percentage or dollar amount discount off their order.

Here are some situations we commonly see chefs create discount codes:

To create repeat business: encourage customers to order from you again by printing a thank you card with a discount code and including it with each order.
Gifting: easily gift your friends, family, or loyal customers with some money off their order
Follower exclusive discounts: offer exclusive discount codes to your social media followers and you could see your following grow!

Creating discount codes

Under the Store tab of your Hotplate portal, click on Discounts on the right
Click Add
At the top, enter a Title and the actual Code you want customers to use
Set the Discount type

For a dollar amount off (ex: $5 off), use Flat($) and enter the Discount Amount
For a percentage off, use Percentage (%) and enter the Discount Amount, and the Maximum discount value in dollars (ex: 15% off, with a maximum of $10 off)

General discount: customers can use this for any Event
Event discount: customers can use this for a specific Event that you select here
Customer discount: specific customers you select here can use these to purchase from any Event

Choose a Start date from which the discount code will work (not an option for Event discounts). You can also add an End date (optional).
Set a Minimum subtotal required for the discount code to work. If you want the code to apply to any order size, set this to $0.00.
Set the Maximum uses if you want to limit the number of times in total the code can be used.
You can also choose to Restrict the code to first time customers or set Maximum uses per customer if you want to limit the number of times a customer can use this specific code.

Once you have some discount codes, they will be visible on the Discounts tab of the Store page:

The Active tab will show:

The Inactive tab will show:

Codes that have been manually "Disabled"
Codes that have Expired (codes with an end date that have passed)
Codes that have been "Exhausted", meaning the Maximum uses limit you set has been reached.

You can click on each code to see details on it’s settings and how much it’s been used. That info panel will look like this:

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