Apply an early-bird discount to conference registrants
Every conference registration creates a Stripe customer with the early-bird coupon already applied to their account.
New submission on your "Conference signup" form
Create a customer and apply a Stripe coupon to their account
One-directional. A submission triggers the action — nothing is written back into your form.
Early-bird pricing only works if the discount is still attached when the invoice goes out, which is usually weeks after the registration form was filled in.
Event teams set this up so the coupon is applied at signup rather than remembered later. Each registration creates the Stripe customer with the discount already on the account, and whoever raises the invoices does not have to reconcile a spreadsheet of who registered before the cut-off against a list of who has been charged.
Setting it up
- 1
Create the early-bird coupon in Stripe first and copy its ID. Give it a redeem-by date matching your cut-off so the discount expires on its own rather than depending on someone remembering to edit a Zap.
- 2
Publish the conference form with Email Address and Registration Type both required. Registration Type is what decides who gets the discount, so an empty answer means an unclassified attendee.
- 3
In Zapier, add the formformform trigger on New Submission, choose the conference form, and pull in a sample registration.
- 4
Add a Zapier filter on Registration Type so only paying tiers continue. Comped speakers, sponsors and staff should not turn into discounted billing records — they are not being invoiced at all.
- 5
Add Stripe's Create Customer action, mapping Full Name to Name, Email Address to Email and Organization to Description, so finance can tell two attendees from the same company apart.
- 6
Put the coupon ID in the Coupon field on that same Create Customer step. The discount is attached to the account at the moment it is created, with no second action to go wrong.
- 7
Send Attendance Type and Days You'll Attend into customer metadata, so whoever raises the invoice can see whether they are billing an in-person or online ticket without opening the form.
- 8
Register a test attendee, open their customer in Stripe and confirm the discount is showing on the account, then turn the Zap on.
What maps where
Using the Conference Registration Form as the starting point. These are its real fields — swap in your own and the mapping works the same way.
| Form field | Stripe |
|---|---|
| Email Address | Email on the Stripe customer |
| Full Name | Name on the Stripe customer |
| Organization | Description on the Stripe customer |
| Registration Type | Filter condition deciding which coupon, if any, is attached |
| Attendance Type | Customer metadata, in person or online |
| Days You'll Attend | Customer metadata, used when the invoice is drafted |
Variations worth knowing
Build a Zapier Formatter lookup table turning each Registration Type answer into its own coupon ID — student, non-profit, returning attendee. The Create Customer step then reads the coupon from the lookup rather than a fixed value, and adding a new tier means adding a row, not rebuilding the Zap.
Stripe refuses an expired coupon and fails the whole step, which would lose the customer record too. Add a Zapier path that checks the submission date against your cut-off: before it, create the customer with the coupon; after it, create the same customer without one.
If something isn't arriving
The coupon ID is not its display name — copy the ID from the coupon's page in Stripe. Check the mode as well: a coupon created in test mode does not exist in live, so a Zap connected with a live key cannot see it.
Attaching a coupon to a customer does not bill anybody. The discount is applied when an invoice or subscription is created against that customer, so add Create Invoice Item and Create Invoice steps, or raise the invoices from Stripe once the tier is confirmed.
Frequently asked questions
Can attendees pay the conference fee on the form?
Yes. Add products and priced options to the form, then collect payment through secure hosted checkout with Stripe, PayPal, or Square. Payment status is tracked alongside the response.
Does the registrant see the discounted price when they submit?
Not from the form. Your confirmation copy can say the early-bird rate applies, but the figure itself appears on the Stripe invoice, because Stripe never sends anything back into a submission or a confirmation screen.
Can the discount be limited to the first hundred registrants?
Yes — set max redemptions on the coupon in Stripe. Once it is used up the coupon is rejected the same way an expired one is, so pair it with the path described above or registrations will start failing rather than arriving at full price.
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Build the form first
The automation needs somewhere to fire from. Publish a form, connect it once, and every submission from then on runs this flow.
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