LifterLMS Coupons and Vouchers: Discounts, Bulk Seats and Prepaid Access

LifterLMS has two code-based tools in the free core plugin, and they are often confused because both involve typing a code. They solve opposite problems.

A coupon changes what a student pays at checkout. A voucher means the student never sees checkout at all: someone has already paid, or nobody needs to, and the code simply grants access.

Pick the wrong one and you end up with orders that should not exist, or access with no record of who paid for it. This tutorial covers both tools, then matches them to the situations they suit.

Coupons and vouchers at a glance

	Coupon	Voucher
Found under	Orders > Coupons	Orders > Vouchers
What it does	Lowers the price of an access plan	Enrolls the student in set courses and memberships
Where the code is entered	On the Checkout page	On the registration form or the Student Dashboard
Creates an order	Yes	No
Payment gateway involved	Yes, unless the discount brings the price to zero	Never
Limits	Total uses, expiration date, product and plan type	Uses per code
Typical use	Promotions, partner discounts, scholarships with a paper trail	Seats sold by invoice, prepaid access, bundles handed out offline

Create a coupon: every setting

Go to Orders > Coupons and choose Add Coupon. The title you type at the top is the code students enter, so keep it short and unambiguous. If you publish two coupons with the same code, LifterLMS warns you and customers get the most recently created one.

General

• Discount Type: Percentage Discount, or a fixed amount in your store currency.
• Access Plan Types: Any Access Plan, Only One-time Payment Access Plans, or Only Recurring Access Plans.
• Discount Amount: a number only, without a currency or percent symbol. It is subtracted from the plan's price.
• Enable Trial Pricing Discount and Trial Discount Amount: an optional second discount that applies to a plan's trial price.

Restrictions

• Courses and Membership: limit the coupon to specific products. Leave both empty and it works on everything you sell.
• Coupon Expiration Date: the last day the code works. Leave it blank for no expiration.
• Usage Limit: the total number of times the code can be used. Empty or 0 means unlimited.

Description

An internal note that students never see. Record who the coupon was made for and why, because in six months nobody will remember what PARTNER15 was.

How coupon discounts really behave

• Recurring plans are discounted on every payment. The coupon reduces the plan price stored on the order, and that reduced amount is what each renewal charges. Core has no "first payment only" switch. A lifetime 20 percent discount for a monthly subscriber may be more generous than you intended, so restrict such coupons to one-time plans unless you mean it.
• The trial price is untouched unless you say otherwise. On a plan with a paid trial, the main discount applies to the regular price that follows. Only the trial discount fields lower the trial price itself.
• Sale prices stack with coupons. If a plan is on sale, the coupon is subtracted from the sale price, not the original.
• A discount to zero skips payment. When a coupon brings the amount due to nothing, the student completes checkout without a gateway, and an order is still created. That makes a 100 percent coupon a tidy way to grant free access with a record.
• One coupon per order. The checkout has a single coupon field. Students remove one code to try another.
• The usage limit is global. It counts orders that carry the code, whatever their status, so an order that was started and never paid still uses one. There is no per-student limit in core. Leave headroom on tight limits and check the count before a campaign ends.

At checkout, students see "Have a coupon?" with a link that reveals the field and an Apply Coupon button. The total updates in place, and a clear message appears if the code has expired, has run out of uses, or does not apply to that product or plan type. Plans marked free do not show the coupon field at all.

Before you publish a code anywhere, test it in a private browser window against each plan it should and should not work on. If you need rules beyond these, LifterLMS sells an Advanced Coupons add-on, and the official coupon documentation covers the basics. Pricing itself is set on access plans, which we explain in memberships and access plans.

Create a voucher and its codes

1. Go to Orders > Vouchers and choose Add Voucher. The title is an internal name, such as "Acme Ltd, 25 seats, March".
2. Under Courses and Membership, select everything the voucher should unlock. One voucher can grant several courses and memberships at once.
3. In the Codes area, fill in the line that reads "Add ... new code(s) with ... use(s) per code" and click Add. You can generate up to 50 codes per click and repeat as needed.
4. Edit the generated codes if you prefer something readable. Each code can be up to 20 characters, and the number of uses can be changed per code.
5. Publish the voucher. Codes on a draft voucher are rejected as no longer valid.

The main design decision is codes versus uses. One code with 25 uses is easy to distribute in a single email, but it can be forwarded to anyone and you cannot cut off one person. Twenty-five codes with one use each take more handling, and they tell you exactly who redeemed which seat.

How students redeem a voucher

There are two places, depending on whether the person has an account.

• New students use the registration form. It includes a "Have a voucher?" link that reveals a Voucher Code field, and the account is created and enrolled in one step. That form appears on the Student Dashboard only when Open Registration is enabled under LifterLMS > Settings > Accounts, so switch it on before you send codes to people without accounts.
• Existing students log in, open the Redeem a Voucher tab on the Student Dashboard, enter the code and submit.

Vouchers are not entered on the Checkout page. Tell recipients exactly where to go, with a link, because "enter this code at checkout" is the instinctive assumption.

On redemption the student is enrolled in every course and membership attached to the voucher. No order is created, so nothing appears in Order History or in sales reporting. A student can redeem a given code only once, and a code stops working when its uses run out.

One side effect matters for automation. Because there is no order, engagements triggered by a purchase do not fire for voucher students. Engagements triggered by enrollment do. If your welcome email is tied to "Student purchases a course", voucher students will never get it. See engagements and automated emails for the difference.

Track usage

For coupons, the list at Orders > Coupons shows a Usage / Limit column next to each code's amount and expiration date, and each order stores the code it used.

For vouchers, open the voucher itself:

• The Codes area shows uses so far against the limit for every code.
• The Redemptions tab lists the name and email of each student, the date, and the code used.
• The export box generates a CSV of either the codes with their uses and remaining uses, or the redeemed codes with student emails and dates. It can also email the file to one or more addresses, which suits a seat report for a client.

To withdraw a code, delete it from the voucher. To stop a whole batch, return the voucher to draft. Students already enrolled keep their access either way, so remove enrollments separately if that is what the situation requires.

Bulk and B2B scenarios

Situation	Use	Why
A company pays by invoice for 25 seats	Voucher with single-use codes	Payment happened outside the site, and you can report who took each seat
A partner sells prepaid access cards	Voucher, one code per card	The buyer redeems without a card payment on your site
A conference audience gets 30 percent off for a week	Coupon with an expiration date	They still pay, and each sale is an order
Staff or scholarship places, with a record	100 percent coupon limited to the course	Free access, but an order exists for each person
A client wants a bundle of three courses per employee	One voucher with all three courses	A single code enrolls each person in everything
A client wants to add, remove and monitor its own learners	The Groups add-on	Vouchers have no manager role or seat reassignment

That last row is where vouchers stop. They hand out access and report on redemption, nothing more. When an organization needs its own leader, seat management and progress reporting, read our guide to groups and team training.

Limits to plan around

• Vouchers have no expiration date setting. End a campaign by deleting unused codes or unpublishing the voucher.
• A voucher enrollment has no access plan behind it, so plan settings such as access expiration do not apply. If access should end after a year, you need a process or custom logic for that.
• Vouchers cannot collect money. If a client should pay on your site for a batch of seats, that is a different flow.
• Coupons cannot be limited to one use per student, restricted to named customers, or applied only to the first recurring payment with core settings alone.
• Neither tool handles tax. Discounts change the amount charged, and tax is a separate question covered in our tutorial on selling courses with LifterLMS.

What to do next

Create one coupon and one voucher on a staging site and redeem each as a test student. Watch what lands in Orders, on the Student Dashboard and in your welcome emails. A few minutes of testing shows the difference better than any description, and the voucher documentation is a useful companion while you do it.

Professional help earns its cost when codes become part of a sales process: seats that expire, vouchers generated automatically when an invoice is paid in your accounting or CRM system, self-service bulk purchases, or coupon rules core does not offer. Those are LifterLMS development projects, and for the CRM side, integrations. Tell us how you sell to organizations and we will suggest the simplest setup that fits.