Why your Wolt promotion is not showing to customers

Wolt is the only delivery platform we have examined that tells restaurant operators, through an API, whether a discount on an order was funded by the merchant or by the platform. Its order documentation describes the campaigns_applied field as a “List of venue campaigns that were applied to the order” and then adds the rule that matters: “Only campaigns sponsored (fully or partially) by the merchant are exposed.” An empty array means “no campaigns to expose for this order (none applied or all sponsored by Wolt)”. A discount can therefore be visibly running and legitimately absent from your own data.

We do not publish a downtime figure for Wolt. Our July 2026 measurements cover the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Wolt trades elsewhere, so there is no number of ours that belongs here. The Wolt specific thing to check first is permissions, because campaign creation is restricted to two named roles and a manager without one of them will report the promotions screen as missing rather than as forbidden.

Where do you create a promotion on Wolt, and who is allowed to?

In the Merchant Portal, under Campaigns, and only from two roles. Wolt’s instruction is “log into the Merchant Portal and navigate to the Campaigns tab and click ‘New campaign'”, with the restriction stated separately: “To create a campaign, users will need to have Access Role of ‘Merchant Owner’ or ‘Venue Owner’.” Source: merchant.wolt.com.

That role rule is the least glamorous cause on this page and one of the commonest. In a chain, the person who notices a promotion is missing and the person permitted to create one are frequently not the same person, and Wolt does not present a request path from inside the interface. Wolt describes the portal itself as somewhere you “Analyze sales data”, “Update your opening hours”, “Edit your menu”, “Create campaigns” and “Download all your invoices”, so a user who can do four of those five may reasonably assume the fifth is broken.

What does Wolt’s API reveal about who funded a discount?

More than any other platform’s, and the wording is precise. The campaigns_applied field is documented as exposing only merchant sponsored campaigns, with three distinct outcomes spelled out: a “Non-empty array: applied campaigns”, an “Empty array ([]): no campaigns to expose for this order (none applied or all sponsored by Wolt)”, and “null: campaign information could not be resolved for this order (transient, retriable)”. Source: developer.wolt.com/docs/api.

For anyone reconciling campaigns against orders this is the single most useful sentence Wolt publishes, and it is also a trap. An empty array is genuinely ambiguous by design: it means either that no campaign applied or that Wolt paid for the one that did. A finance team treating empty as no promotion will undercount the discounts customers actually saw, and a marketing team treating it the same way will conclude a campaign underperformed when the platform was funding parallel offers alongside it. The null case is a third thing again, a transient failure Wolt says can be retried rather than a fact about the order.

Who pays for a Wolt promotion, and when?

The merchant, on completed orders only, and by netting rather than invoice. Wolt states: “You only pay for confirmed orders placed through your promotion”, followed by “The cost of the promotion will be deducted from the following payment made by Wolt.” Advertising is charged the same way and Wolt is explicit that impressions are free: “You only pay for ads when an order is placed through it – you aren’t charged for clicks or impressions.”

Wolt does not publish a co funding percentage anywhere in its merchant material, so an operator asking what share Wolt carries on a given campaign will not find the answer on the platform’s own pages. What the API establishes is only that the two categories exist and that Wolt sponsored campaigns are deliberately kept out of the merchant’s order data. The three promotion types Wolt names to merchants are “Discount for Customers”, “€0 Delivery Fee for New Customers” and “Free or Discounted Item”, with the portal picker labelled “No delivery fee”, “Order value discount” and item promotions.

Why can nobody in your team see your Wolt Fire Deal?

Because Fire Deals are aimed at strangers and rationed per person. Wolt publishes both rules together: “Fire Deals are shown only to customers who haven’t ordered from you before” and “Each customer sees Fire Deals only once per week”. Everyone in the business who has ever ordered from their own brand is permanently outside the first rule, and anyone who saw it on Monday is outside the second until the following week.

Fire Deals also depend on a second product being live. Wolt states that it “works alongside Sponsored Listings, so you’ll need an active Sponsored Listing campaign. Then choose a basket discount and set your weekly budget in the Merchant Portal”. A Fire Deal whose underlying Sponsored Listing has stopped is therefore a campaign that exists and reaches nobody, and the two live on different screens. Where it can appear is stated as “Discovery”, “Your venue page” and “Checkout”. Source: merchant.wolt.com.

Why does a Wolt item discount not appear at the time you set?

Because the Menu API applies scheduling rules to discounts that are stricter than most operators assume. A scheduled discount “is applied only within the given time window”, it “Requires discounted_price (and therefore price) to be set”, “At least one of starts_at or ends_at must be provided”, and where both are given “the window must span at least 10 minutes, and ends_at must not be in the past.” A discount pushed through an integration with a malformed or already expired window is not an error the customer ever sees, it is simply a price that never changes.

The item itself has to be live as well. Wolt documents the enabled flag on a menu item as meaning that “When false the item will not be visible to consumers”, so an item switched off for stock reasons takes its discount with it. Wolt keeps venue availability in two separate booleans, is_open and is_online, and a promotion attached to a venue that is open on paper but not online reaches nobody either.

Where does a Wolt promotion appear to customers?

In three places, and Wolt names them: customers see it “when they visit your store, on the ‘Offers near you’ carousel found on the Discovery page, and in searches”, with a badge added in those locations while the promotion runs. That badge is the thing to look for during an audit, because it is present or absent in a way a venue page makes obvious, unlike the campaign record in the portal.

The gap this page keeps returning to is that Wolt’s own reporting deliberately excludes platform funded offers, so a chain that reconciles only from its order data cannot see the full promotional picture on its own listings. Kitchain (kitchain.co) reads the offer badge rendered on each Wolt venue page daily, which captures both the campaigns Wolt exposes in the API and the ones it does not.

For Wolt itself, its markets, its venue states and what else takes a listing offline, see our profile at kitchain.co/aggregators/wolt/.