What Is a Voucher? Discount vs Gift Vouchers

Quick Definition

A voucher is a code or card that gives money off, credit, or a specific product. In online stores, the two main kinds are discount vouchers, which lower the price, and gift vouchers, which someone has already paid for. Voucher is a common word in the UK; US shoppers more often say coupon or gift card.

Three Kinds of Voucher

The word covers more than one thing. What matters is who paid for it and what it does to your price.

Discount voucher. A code that takes money off, like 10% or $5 off. You pay for it with a lower margin.
Gift voucher. Prepaid value that someone bought, often as a present. You've already got that money.
Credit voucher. Store credit you give back, say on a return instead of a cash refund. The shopper spends it later, just like a gift voucher.

What Shopify Calls a Voucher

Shopify doesn't have a feature called voucher. A discount voucher is a discount code, which you set up under Discounts in your admin. A gift voucher is a gift card, and gift cards have their own settings.

Shoppers type both into the same box at checkout, but Shopify handles them differently. A discount code lowers the order total, while a gift card pays for part or all of it, like cash.

Not Every Voucher Is a Price Cut

It's tempting to lump all vouchers together. Don't. A gift voucher and a discount voucher do very different things to your profit.

Example: two vouchers on the same $40 order

A tea shop sells a $40 tin. Its product cost is $20.

Order one is paid with a $40 gift voucher. The shop already got $40 when it sold that voucher, so it keeps $20 ($40 − $20).

Order two uses a $10 discount voucher. The shopper pays $30 and the shop keeps $10 ($30 − $20). That's half what it made on order one.

So a gift voucher is money you've already collected, and a discount voucher is money you give up. When you look back at how a sale went, count them separately.

Why the Voucher Box Can Cost You Sales

The voucher field sits right where people pay. A shopper without a code may see that empty box and leave to go hunting for one. Some find a code they didn't need. Others don't come back.

That's why a lot of stores apply the discount for the shopper, so there's nothing to type. Our guide to auto-applying voucher codes on Shopify shows how it's done.

Growth Suite, our Shopify app, does this with its own offers. Every visitor who gets an offer is given a unique, single-use code, and the app adds it to their cart. Once the offer's timer runs out, the code is deleted on the server.