Create an offer or discount

Run a promo code, a percentage off, a buy-one-get-one, or a deal that fills your quiet nights.

Offers in the left-hand menu is where your discounts and deals live. The Current tab shows everything that is running at the moment, and Archived shows the offers you have retired.

Click Create Offer and Dinerly takes you through it a step at a time.

Step 1 — what kind of offer, and where it runs

First you choose the reward itself:

• Discount takes money off, either as a percentage or as a fixed amount, and you can apply it to the whole order, to certain categories, or to specific items.
• Buy one, get one gives the customer a second item free when they buy the first, and the free one can be the same item or a different one.
• Free item with minimum spend gives something away once the customer has spent enough, which is the usual way of nudging an order up to a round number.
• Combination offer builds a deal out of several items chosen in steps, which is how you put together a meal deal.

Then you choose where the offer applies:

• Online ordering applies it in the basket and at the checkout.
• Reservations shows it on your booking page during the days and times it runs and notes it on the booking itself, which makes it the right choice for filling Monday to Thursday.

The offer type cannot be changed once the offer has been created, so this is the step worth taking a moment over. Everything else can be edited afterwards.

Step 2 — the details

• Offer Name and Description are shown to the customer, so write them the way you would say them out loud. “20% off Monday lunch” tells somebody what they are getting, whereas “PROMO_MON_20” tells them nothing and looks like a mistake on your website.
• Internal Notes are for you and your team only and are never shown to customers, so this is where you record why the offer exists and when it should stop.
• Promo code or automatic decides how the offer is claimed. A Code has to be typed in by the customer, which is what you want when you are sending it to a specific group of people, while Automatic applies itself to every order that qualifies.
• Fulfilment restriction limits the offer to delivery or to collection only.
• Customer eligibility lets you choose First Order Only, which is aimed at winning new customers, or Returning Customers, which rewards the people you already have.
• Usage limits cap the total number of times the offer can be used and the number of times per customer. Always set a per-customer limit on anything generous, because codes get shared between friends and posted on deal websites, and without a limit one code can be used hundreds of times.
• Validity sets the dates, days and times the offer runs, or you can leave it with no expiry if it is a permanent part of what you do.

After it’s live

If the items an offer depends on run out, the offer shows as Sold out and takes itself off the menu until they are back in stock, so customers are never offered something you cannot make.

Duplicate copies an existing offer to use as the starting point for a new one, which is by far the quickest way to run last month’s deal again with new dates.

Delete archives the offer rather than destroying it. It stops applying to new orders and its promo code becomes available to use again, while every order that already used it stays exactly as it was. You can Restore an archived offer later, and it comes back as a draft so that you get the chance to check the dates before it goes live again.

Check what a deal actually did. A discount given to people who would have come anyway is money you simply handed away, so the useful question is not how many times the code was used but whether the nights you were trying to fill actually got busier. Run the offer on your quiet nights and then look at Analytics for those days to find out.

Last updated 20 September 2026