Why "Coupon Code" Should Not be a Field on Your Payment Form | Hacker News Reader

Why "Coupon Code" Should Not be a Field on Your Payment Form

rachelbaker.me

209 pointsrachelbaker94 comments

It depends.

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.

This is my hunch, as well. You can make a 5% coupon easily available for anyone who searches on Google, and bake it into your pricing. Customers feel they got a deal, and you keep the flexibility to use larger coupons for specific promotions.

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".

Why even make them go to Google? Put a link right next to the coupon code: Don't have a code? Take our <a href="#">3 question survey</a> and get one now!

Then you can learn a bit more about your customers, and make them happier about buying at the same time.

Or just ask the customer to subscribe to your mailing list to receive coupons. You can send them one coupon immediately for their current purchase (possibly even applicable retroactively if email is slow when they are completing their purchase). Then you can send them more email coupons (and personalized recommendations) in the future to keep them coming back. :)

I once sent an email to my subscribers offering a discount code (this was a very small list) and within a day, the coupon was on retailmenot. I think in the future, I'm going to have a coupon box with codes published in as many places as possible. The buyer feels like they're getting a deal, and the seller gets a new customer.

Testing and finding the right methods for your individual audience is the best thing you can do.

I am just not a fan of showing a distraction to someone willing to give you money.

Most people looking at your Purchase page are not willing to give you money. A typical shopping cart abandonment rate is more than 75%.

Shopping cart or checkout? I pile stuff in shopping carts and walk away from it all the time, but once I get to the checkout page where the coupon box is displayed, the purchase is going to happen.

Some sites don't give accurate shipping information until final checkout which is really irritating. I'll go through part of the checkout process so I can get a final price and then leave to compare prices.

Even Amazon will let you get pretty far before it tells you that product is not allowed for sale in your region. Worst case was a big ticket ASUS laptop I did plenty of research on (there may be warnings on the product pages IF you are logged in while browsing, I was not).

Amazon tends to just mention that the item is not available to shipping for all countries and only at checkout does it complain that it may not sell it to you.

To add insult to injury they now spam me advertisements of the products I had to abandon, which they naturally still cannot sell me.

>there may be warnings on the product pages [about regional availability]* IF you are logged in while browsing,*

This is the right way to do it. How're they supposed to know where you're from, where you'll be buying, if you're not logged in. The alternative appears to be to ask every visitor to give their location before you show them anything.

Amazon knows where you are, geo-IP databases are fast and accurate.

They're not very accurate. They get my country wrong quite regularly.

Also Amazon may know your current location but not where you'll be when you buy something. If I'm travelling does that mean that I can't buy something shipped to my home that would I could buy if I were at home.

What about the type of customer that such a scheme attracts?

Oh, it's a way of doing discriminatory pricing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

As well as market segmentation, customers might be more likely to purchase if they get a little thrill of accomplishment with getting a discount.

...just like supermarket coupons.

I remember an anecdote about a record store with a similar tactic for selling CDs. They'd put out 5 copies of a CD; 4 copies would be marked at $13 and 1 copy would be marked at $11. People browsing would notice the cheaper copy and immediately snatch it up, thinking they had found a good deal (possibly due to a mistake on the part of the store), at which point the store would just go and "mark down" one of the other copies.

And when you know which customers use coupon codes, you can entice them with "sign up for our email coupons". Lulu.com sends out a LOT of email coupons (though their emails might be [even] more effective if the emails included personalized links to new books they think I would like based on my previous purchases).

I work with a lot of retail stores and yes, if you add "Coupon Code" to the checkout page some customers will stop and start looking for coupons. There are a couple of options:

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.

Incidentally, be careful with rental cars. There are codes out there which cause the quoted price to go up!

Citation? Not doubting you, just generally curious.

I've never seen codes that make the price go up but I have seen codes that are incompatible with corporate rate codes. For example, Hertz gives an American Express corporate rate but sometimes coupons require a different corporate rate (like AAA) and the coupon + new rate is actually a worse deal than just the original corporate rate.

Does anyone out there have an answer from actual A/B testing?

I think this is about the time that Patrick (patio11) chimes in :)

Sorry to disappoint. I have done a few A/B tests in my time, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have a comparable that I can share for any element which could possibly be A/B tested.

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.

Haven't tested this specifically, but, every test I've ever done (that had statistically significant results) has shown "Less fields in a form is always better".

"Less fields in a form is always better" is not entirely accurate. I'd agree with "Less fields in a form increases the number of people that complete the form", but this is not necessarily "better".

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.

@pg- see Page 2 & 3 of this paper for actual A/B testing results on the coupon code issue

http://cginsights.posterous.com/hippo-ab-testing

Good find. Here is a summary for those who don't want to dig though the Scribd document.

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.

http://www.conversiondoctor.com/conversion-blog/coupon-codes...

  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)

I use NameCheap and they have this field. There's also http://www.namecheapcoupons.com/ though, which is very findable.

... 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

I've done this at http://blog.frogmorecs.com/post/7190338563/print-distributor... to try and get ahead of the coupon spam. In the long term I am going to switch to coupon links and drop the field

A better alternative may be to frame it differently

    If applicable, please enter your gift card number.

This implies it is single use though.

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.

I had this exact experience that Rachel describes the other day -- was signing up a new startup and saw that, was already feeling like the service was too expensive, then got annoyed at the idea that me (some sucker from the web) was paying more than other people and just ditched the signup process.

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.

It works if you have a "default" coupon (say knock a couple of dollars off the $30 total) that one can apply to not feel like they're "missing out"... you can still also have others, but "letting everyone win" prevents sore feelings and attrition during the checkout process.

I've hardened myself to them. Crank up the cynical notch and think "I don't participate in gimmicks like this, I'm not barking like a dog for a few measly bucks from these guys" and arrogantly leave the coupon code blank. Its essentially an emotional appeal anyway.

Works most of the time.

There is academic research that confirms the injustice hypothesis:

http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/Promo/Eco...

I have to agree, when I see coupon field I know there's a discount I'm not getting so I go and look for it.

Right! Nerds pride themselves on knowing how to find good deals.

and Jews.

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".

This comment sickens me.

EDIT - I will always speak out against anything racial so that I never become a silent witness to a hate crime. However, thank you for clarifying your comment and best of luck to you.

I want to emphasize that I AM Jewish. I even grew up in a religious household. If you're too sensitive to something like the above comment, then you must really hate shows like "Curb Your Enthusiasm".

This is a text-based medium. We cannot hear your tone of voice, we cannot see your body language. It is therefore difficult for us to tell whether a two word comment is intended to be read in the style of Curb Your Enthusiasm (never seen it, btw) or Ayman al-Zawahiri.

I think Ayman al-Zawahiri would have something a little more strongly worded than "Jews pride themselves on being able to find good deals" ...

sigh

Whose name should I use to indicate genuine anti-semitism?

I love 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'. That doesn't mean I want stereotype humor here – unless it can be artfully deployed to add some unique new insight. (Many others don't grant even that exception for referencing stereotypes.)

Also, CYE's humor is way beyond recitation of cliched stereotypes; common knowledge of stereotypes is the setup, not the punchline. Usually, Larry's elaborate mishaps while trying to escape, reverse, or disavow stereotypes creates the humor.

So perhaps if you now go through comically absurd lengths to prove both your religious sensitivity and your essential loyalty to The Tribe, but fail miserably so that by the end of the episode everyone is against you – then you can use the "I'm just like Larry David" defense.

/slow clap

So everyone on HN is a nerd?

Not everyone, some accounts are bots & scraping scripts for apps.

Your competitors can also buy AdWords on keywords such as "(your business) coupon codes", sniping your sales at the very end of your funnel.

I agree the Coupon Code field is a taunt, but what if someone has a coupon code and has lost the url for the coupon-specific form, or just ended up at the main form anyway? That could be especially frustrating - to have the coupon and not see any way of entering it.

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.

Maybe the coupon code should be a url? Perhaps via bit.ly/t.co/etc?

I think I would perceive an "I have a coupon" checkbox as taunting me just as much as the text box.

I have a text link that says "Have a coupon?" that expands into a text field when clicked. I'm not sure how much that helps, but it felt slightly less taunting to me.

Having a click-through example.com/deals page which sets a hidden field or drops a cookie could avoid some of the Sad Missed Deal approach.

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).

The coupon code field is only intended to be seen by people who already have a coupon code. Solution? Make the coupon code field inconspicuous and hard to find. Make it an accordion dropdown in small text somewhere in the corner, for example. Those holding a coupon code will not give up trying to find that place to type in their coupon code, while those who don't have a coupon code have minimal chance of being thrown off by the taunting "coupon code" field.

When confronted with the same problem - the taunting "coupon code" field - our solution was to use URL parameters in combination with the canonical hint.

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.

That does sound like the most ideal solution. Thank you for sharing.

Appreciate the tip as well and for anyone else that had no idea what "with the canonical hint" meant, I think it means using <link rel="canonical" href="..." /> in the <head> to point Googlebot at the preferred public landing page (without the coupon code box).

More info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...

No offense meant but who is "us"? I'd like to look at your site, compare it to my target market, and then decide if I think it's a technique we could use.

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.

Allmenus.com yesterday launched a new feature that somewhat solves this issue. In the shopping cart, we have text reading 'Discount Code' with a link 'Apply'. If you click the link, we reveal an input box with a button to submit a coupon code.

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.

On the other hand, I was once told by a savvy marketer "You know you've got them when your customers think they're fucking you."

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.

I generally agree (especially for startups and other less established / unfamiliar-to-the-user vendors).

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.

4. People who buy Apple because they get pissed at Lenovo/Dell's bullshit pricing games and horribly broken webstore pages.

I was briefly thinking about this the other day and my quick fix was to de-emphasize the coupon/gift card fields by using progressive disclosure. Screenshot of mockup: http://d.pr/KxJe. Although this doesn't completely remove the fact that the site accepts coupons, it helps with the 'empty field' issue described in the original post. Thoughts on this? Anybody run across any other solutions?

A better alternative is to pre-fill the form with a "standard" discount, or have that code somewhere nearby. Coupon codes work wonders for tracking off site promotions. Are people finding you from a blog, a magazine article, a special event, or what? Having specific coupon codes for each let's you measure the effectiveness of campaigns you otherwise wouldn't be able to accurately measure.

The funniest thing here is that often all it takes to look up coupon code is tho view page source, where coupon code is hardcoded in javascript.

Our product is featured a lot on daily deal sites so we have to show a coupon code box. What we also do is include the logo of the daily deal site (Groupon, Zulily etc.) as a visual hint to the customer as to where the coupon might come from. That way, I hope, we eliminate the curiousity. Haven't ever heard from a customer asking for a coupon.

When I purchase something on Amazon and GoDaddy, I usually spend 3 minutes to google a coupon to save $5. It feels good.

I get distracted by those fields too, especially with car rental companies where I KNOW there are lots of coupon codes out there. Even after I find one part of me is still wondering if I could have gotten a better deal if I'd just searched a little bit longer.

At Trafficspaces, we include a coupon code called LUCKYDAY right there on the payment page of all our plans. Saves the Google search and increase conversion rates to over 30%.

http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/

If you need this field, try calling it "Gift Code" or something more cryptic like that. People will be less likely to assume it's something they'll find on RetailMeNot.

I'm almost done with savable.net, I'll be developing a large database of coupon codes that you can us when facing the empty coupon code box.

http://xkcd.com/837/ How I wish this was a real thing. :(

It would actually be kind of cool if you could use (relatively) long content in promo fields. It might be an interesting problem to teach your site to recognize it, but it seems like there's a lot of potential.

Levenshtein distance?

That is why RetailMeNot exists.

Has anyone ever had a code from here work? I can't think of a single instance where I've had one accepted.

Yep, I had one work.

I've had plenty work. Maybe you are thinking of bugmenot?

Some venders embrace retailmenot and thrive, some make them pull all codes and probably suffer for it.

I've tried one from retailmenot in the past week or so which failed, but I think you're right, it's bugmenot that rarely works.

I've found it works about half the time. Still good enough for me to bother checking. They have a bookmarklet.

I'm sure I've used a code from RetailMeNot more than one hundred times. It is a useful site and the success percentages are reliable.

I've had a ton of them work, especially for NameCheap and GoDaddy.

Idea for a browser plugin: find coupon codes when such a field appears on a form

When I see Coupon Code the first thing I do is look on Twitter Search.

interesting that you're searching Twitter & not a regular search engine (Google, etc). i have searched Twitter over search engines to figure out what's going on nearby (ex: what's causing the fireworks)

Wow, a generalisation based on a single anecdotal data point!

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/

I've canceled several purchases for the same reason she did. Granted, if I need it, I buy it, but when it comes to discretionary purchases, the box has made a difference.

Maybe it's anecdotal, but add enough of them together and you have a legitimate case against the coupon box.

You can't sum anecdotes, addition is undefined for that kind of data

(But there might be a case there if you took some real measurements)

You get the point. Sentiment matters.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

You can add another point to the data set. Granted, I don't crash my browser looking for coupon codes, but I always try to, when I see a check out page like this.

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.

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