On an older site I ran we discovered the same thing and exploited it. We made it easy to find coupons for our product via Google. Interested visitors would land on our buy page, see the coupon field, search Google, find one and buy the product because they felt like they were getting a great deal. The conversion rate went up. The original price took in to account a lot of users would be using a discount. We split tested having the field and not, and we made more money with the coupon code field and giving out a lot of coupons.
Yes, some users that would have paid full price may take advantage of the discount. But, potentially, you will get a lot of customers that only buy because they find a discount. My guess is that this works better for lower cost "consumer" type purchases (not larger, business purchases).
Making coupons / discounts easy to find is a marketing strategy. Why do you think half the apps in the app stores have "Limited time discount offer!" as the first line of their description.
I haven't tried this yet, but I am planning to give it a shot once I launch the app I'm working on. It seems to work for GoDaddy, at any rate!
I strongly suspect that we wouldn't be reading this post if the author had found a working coupon as the first result when searching for "product X coupon".
Then you can learn a bit more about your customers, and make them happier about buying at the same time.
I am just not a fan of showing a distraction to someone willing to give you money.
a) Don't call it coupon. Call it "offer code" or "referral code" or something that doesn't immediately scream "Discount!"
b) Why try to hide the codes? They will be easy enough to find on Google if they're available so instead, make compelling offers where you provide discounts in exchange for customers purchasing more or taking some other action. Look at rental car web sites. Most offer a "Deals" page where you can see coupon codes because they realized the codes were easily shared anyways.
c) Don't use a text box. Instead create referral links with the code embedded so that only people using the links will get the coupon code. This way, people without codes never see the option to enter one.
d) Check the HTTP referrer when a visitor first arrives and apply coupon codes as needed OR only display the coupon box when you know a customer has come from an advertiser site.
e) Proactively suggest offers that don't require coupon codes at all. For example, when a customer has $97 of items in their cart, display a message box offering a discount if they purchase > $100.
TEST: (Straight A/B test for an online retailer in the women’s clothing market)
Control: Coupon code on the first page of the checkout process.
Variation 1: Coupon code removed.
Results:
Control: 3.8% conversion rate. (967 sales / 25,489 unique visitors)
Variation 1: 5.1% conversion rate. (1,276 sales / 24,991 unique visitors)Here are the two versions: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/493143/ABTest.png (A = Old Page, B = New Page)
1. Doctor FootCare updated their checkout page to include a coupon code field (and a few other minor changes)
2. With the updated version, Doctor FootCare saw a 90% decrease in revenue.
3. Once Doctor FootCare took the coupon code out of the new version (B) the conversion rate of the page was 6.5% higher than the old checkout page (A). The new page without the coupon code field is not pictured.
That is a huge change, but I would not blindly assume that this result proves that the coupon code field should not be included in your checkout form. I would also like more data about the test.
It does not mean that people will actually read the newsletter or complete the checkout process or come back and spend more money, those are the real metrics to track and rarely have anything to do with how many people submit the form.
I would also caution you that, hypothetically assuming I had a comparable here, I might be a little hesitant to say "An A/B test in June 2010 of the behavior of elementary school teachers on summer holiday ready to get their Back to School Bingo started is a great way to predict the behavior of poor startup geeks contemplating a recurring billing arrangement."
The point of A/B testing isn't to anoint someone as the local genius on design and conversion optimization. The takeaway -- over and over and over again -- is that your local genius is routinely wrong about applying their old experience or intuition to new problems.
People pay me good money for advice on things like this question. I give answers, appropriately couched as "My best guess as to how this will play out". A lot of them whiff when exposed to actual customers.
... which gives me an idea - when you hit a coupon code box, you feel the need to supply a coupon, and once you've found one everything's ok again. So what if the company makes it simple to find coupons for small amounts, say 5%, but has other discount codes as well (for 20%) that it uses. Once you find the 5% one you stop searching, and you're also happy because you've got yourself a discount. Meanwhile the company still has a way of offering deeper discounts when needed
If applicable, please enter your gift card number.
Another option is to provide the field when user is already very invested. For instance, he has entered shipping details, contact details etc.
I wonder if anyone has split tested "enter coupon" phrases which doesn't encourage shopping cart abandonment?
The other option is to offer them notification whenever new coupons are available. It is a good way get people who might have abandoned the shopping cart anyway to opt in.
Granted, I wasn't going to make that startup rich, BUT, I didn't even get past that signup page to experience their product and give them a chance to win me over.
With so many choices for every kind of app, I think she brings up a really good point here. Don't make your new customers feel like suckers about to pay sticker-price if they don't have to.
Works most of the time.
http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/Promo/Eco...
EDIT: I want to emphasize that I AM Jewish, and that the above was meant as a joke. I grew up in a religious household and if you're too sensitive to something like the above comment, then make sure to stay away from shows like "Curb Your Enthusiasm".
Perhaps another solution is to have a checkbox "I have a coupon" instead (and ask for the code on the next step) or a link. That's less of an incentive, but still keeps the option for coupon holders on the main form.
I think I would perceive an "I have a coupon" checkbox as taunting me just as much as the text box.
Then again, it immediately informs your potential customers of all your available deals, without the hassle of searching around, so they're more likely to find some way of optimising their payment downwards. You could (pseudo-)randomly display certain deals, or set rate/quantity caps ("Buy quickly, only 50 coupons remain!") to deal with that.
By providing visibility on all your deals, the customer feels more satisfied knowing they got the best possible deal, and you limit the proliferation of all those annoying voucher search sites (and cart abandonment when none of those 3-year old $5 off codes work).
Only users with a coupon code know this URL. The URL parameter won't show up in a Google search, because the canonical is in place. The coupon code works only for that session and will automatically show up on the checkout page.
Works very well for us.
The big concern in implementing techniques like this is that the number of (a) abandoned carts rises due to people who have a coupon yet can't figure out how to use it (or didn't read the instructions in your email), and then (b) the number of support requests will rise. If "us" is a company with 1000 customers, I'm not sure that you've tested the scalability of it with promotional emails sent to, say, 50,000 people on a Tuesday morning. Support for shopping cart-related frustrations is one of those "You'd better provide a response ASAP or you will probably lose the sale" types of problems.
More info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...
I believe that by removing the text box, less visual attention is stressed to go out and find a coupon. If a customer has come to our site with the prior intention of redeeming a coupon, I believe they'll navigate our interface without a problem.
See what i'm talking about, just add an item from the menu to meet the order minimum to see the text appear:
http://www.allmenus.com/ny/new-york/280265-yorganic/menu/
Sidenote: Yes, we'll test the lingo to determine what preforms the best and monitor campaign results for changes in usage patterns.
Make the codes easy to find (put them on Twitter and they'll get scraped by coupon sites), and you can get some traction out of this sort of thing.
That being said, I've seen at least two companies cleverly use the visible coupon code field: Lenovo and Dell. They use it to establish at least 3 tiers of pricing:
1. People who don't use the coupon code at all anyway and get the standard "sale" 2. People who Google for a code and find a 5-10% coupon 3. People who get a better coupon through "less public" means (e.g. newsletter, limited-use coupon, etc.)
On top of that, I suspect Lenovo and Dell have their standard "sales" because they want higher "list" prices that make the corporate volume purchasing discounts look better.
Some venders embrace retailmenot and thrive, some make them pull all codes and probably suffer for it.
You could sink the titanic over again with holes that large.
Guys (and gals), please resist the temptation to take a single personal anecdote that you care about and blow that up into some kind of authoritative advice such as:
Do not show the Coupon code field unless you absolutely need to do so. When sending marketing and promotional materials, send them to a different version of your payment page that reflects the discount you are offering. Having the same payment page for your discounted and full price purchases just invites Google searches for “(app name) coupon code” and resulting abandoned cart.
Those arguments are no better than http://xkcd.com/605/
Maybe it's anecdotal, but add enough of them together and you have a legitimate case against the coupon box.
The other issue to me is that everything else on that page is required except the coupon code. It really makes me feel like I'm missing something.
Remember, this is the World Wide Web, so any claim you make is a gross over-generalization because, by and large, you don't know who your customers are going to be. You can only do A/B testing, collect feedback from your customers, etc, to slowly get better as you go along. If the author is in the minority, who cares? If not, we'll start to see different types of check out pages and the ones that will "win out" will be the ones that meet a sweet spot between ease of implementation and effectiveness.