4 ms·

Outside of ad campaigns, there's another case where coupon codes are useful. If you have a moderately expensive product and an actual sales team, you can use th

by leknarf 13y ago

Outside of ad campaigns, there's another case where coupon codes are useful. If you have a moderately expensive product and an actual sales team, you can use the coupon field to let the sales team make one-off special deals for individual customers. That's useful for unusually large orders (buy 10 get 1 free) or simply if you need to apologize for some sort of error (we're sorry our site was down, here's $50 off your next order). Coupon codes are an easily programmable solution to a wide variety of business problems. They're particularly useful for problems that are difficult to predict in advance.

cdjk 13y ago
True. You can get the same thing with referrer URLs that apply a coupon code behind the scenes, e.g. example.com/store/fifty_off. The logic is the same, you're just hiding the troublesome coupon code field.
- drone 13y ago
  Actually, that is more difficult - trying to explain an alternative workflow to a customer over the phone is not nearly as easy as it sounds. "Enter this coupon code in the field you see on your screen," is much easier than "Ok, type in this new URL exactly, now, once you've done that, add this to your shopping cart, now go to checkout..." I've had to watch a lot of this sort of thing happen, and customers "understand" coupon codes natively at this point - they require practically no instruction. Getting the customer through the transaction as quickly as possible is one of the prime desires for any e-commerce site that also takes phone orders, and coupon codes have been, in my experience, most effective for that. Now, if you want to start a trend of re-training customers to expect specialized URLs they use before entering checkout -- then I'll be more than happy to switch over to that once customers expect it. However, I feel there's a sort of paradox here: Providing discounts to new customers helps create new transactions. The more steps required to complete the transaction, the more like the customer is to abandon the transaction. If a coupon code causes customers without one to be more likely to abandon then it makes sense to require a separate step from the normal checkout workflow to use it, thereby increasing the rate of abandoned transactions.

by leknarf 13y ago

cdjk 13y ago

True. You can get the same thing with referrer URLs that apply a coupon code behind the scenes, e.g. example.com/store/fifty_off. The logic is the same, you're just hiding the troublesome coupon code field.

drone 13y ago
Actually, that is more difficult - trying to explain an alternative workflow to a customer over the phone is not nearly as easy as it sounds. "Enter this coupon code in the field you see on your screen," is much easier than "Ok, type in this new URL exactly, now, once you've done that, add this to your shopping cart, now go to checkout..." I've had to watch a lot of this sort of thing happen, and customers "understand" coupon codes natively at this point - they require practically no instruction. Getting the customer through the transaction as quickly as possible is one of the prime desires for any e-commerce site that also takes phone orders, and coupon codes have been, in my experience, most effective for that. Now, if you want to start a trend of re-training customers to expect specialized URLs they use before entering checkout -- then I'll be more than happy to switch over to that once customers expect it. However, I feel there's a sort of paradox here: Providing discounts to new customers helps create new transactions. The more steps required to complete the transaction, the more like the customer is to abandon the transaction. If a coupon code causes customers without one to be more likely to abandon then it makes sense to require a separate step from the normal checkout workflow to use it, thereby increasing the rate of abandoned transactions.