This coupon code is a slap in the face
justinjackson.ca
justinjackson.ca
If you don't realize you have to jump through this dumb hoop and think you are actually getting the discount automatically, which is quite easy to do (I did, and I'm no dummy), they do not reimburse you the difference if you call on the phone to explain. The guy on the phone specifically explained to me that that is their official policy in this situation.
I mean, I trusted Lenovo (good past experiences), so I wasn't being super duper careful to look for any kind of trick. Imagine that... not looking out for being tricked! What a fool I was.
If you eally want the discount, you have to cancel your order and re-order, which means getting the product later. Lenovo knows very well that many customers won't do this.
tl;dr Lenovo suits have calculated a new way to trick customers, and treat customers in a shitty way. They should be ashamed. Gipped me off for a few hundred bucks.
Never order anything online before checking dealnews.com; Takes 10 additional seconds, saved me thousands. Among other things, they give you every single Lenovo deal (including through the Microsoft Store, which is often better than the coupons in the Lenovo store -- and usually arrives within a couple of days rather than 3 weeks), and they give you the past deals/coupons, so you can see if you need to wait a couple of days to get a 30% price reduction -- Lenovo, and many other vendors, have 30% off in two out of every 3 weeks, or two days out of every week.
* MicroCenter stores won't price match online stores, only nearby competitors.
* Sears stores will price match their own website (which is apparently a mostly separate business), but I don't think they will match any other websites.
* Windstream internet's website didn't work, and when I called in, they told me I'd get the deal on the website. When I got the bill, it was 40% higher. I had to jump through a bunch of hoops on the phone to eventually find out that the price they quoted me is only for places where they have competition. But they gave me the discount anyways since I asked.
Then the radio ad or whatever can say, "Enter DAN SAVAGE as your referrer to receive a free gift!"
People might voluntarily divulge who referred them to your store. Only with the correct entry do you get a discount, as an added bonus to people who answered.
So incorrect results arn't technically incorrect, they're just bonus data.
Second, the notion that this is hostile to the user just bemuses me. I don't understand why this has any detrimental effects on the customer. If they are fine paying full price (as they were when they began checking out), they are free to pay full price. If someone with expendable free time would rather dig through these coupon sites, that is their prerogative. The existence of a coupon code field merely gives the option to seek out a discount. This is similar to most other forms of commerce. If I have free time and want to save money, I can dig through circulars and clip ads, or I can just go to the store and pay full price. Is it offensive to the user that the self checkout also has a slot for placing coupons? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. How is it bad customer service when a user literally isn't forced to do anything other than ignore the field if they so choose? Giving people the option to save money if they are willing to exert some effort is an unequivocal positive aspect of most sites.
This piece is just incoherent to me. I honestly don't understand why this is bad in any way.
The argument is that your conversions drop from people searching for coupon codes. We'll all just have to test that see for ourselves, won't we. This isn't the kind of thing where we've suddenly discovered a new counter-intuitive best practice for shopping carts. It looks like a few finicky people will be upset and call it bad customer service. I for one am willing to write them off as wannabe usability experts and continue to make the majority of users happy most of the time rather than cater to a small but noisy group. In the end you can't please every customer. Ever. Next we'll see a post about why not having a coupon code field is the worst customer service decision in the world too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6205769
http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11363/do-promo-codes-o...
Here's what I've found so far:
- Oliver & Shor found that: "prompting for a code in the absence of having one had negative effects on fairness, satisfaction, and completion when compared to the control." http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/promo/jpb...
- This study by Oliver & Swan (1989) found a big link between a consumer's perception of pricing fairness, and their overall satisfaction with a purchase. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1251411?uid=3737720&ui...
- Xia, Monroe, & Cox found: "For price comparisons, the other-customer comparison has the greatest effect on perceived price unfairness because of the salience of such a comparison" http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/weitz/mar7786/Articles/price%...
- This study by Google found that in a real-world setting, "more than 40% of shoppers have left a retail store without purchasing because they knew they left a coupon at home". http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/from-clipping-t...
As the customer? /I don't care/
As the customer? making me negotiate is work. Coupon codes are a way of automating the negotiation.
Now, different customers feel differently about this. Generally speaking, nerds without business experience? they usually agree with me. Be straight with me. Price discrimination (and, coupons are price discrimination) feels like an insult to them.
The author points out that if you want to charge different people different prices? If people find out, some of them will be pissed.
The author's solution? be discrete about it. there are plenty of ways to include a referral tag without calling it a coupon code. Someone else suggested a "how did you hear about us" - and then there are silent analytics that require no action on the customer's part.
Frankly, I think coupon hunting is a complete waste of time, and the slightly higher margin I might pay at Trader Joes instead of optimizing my shopping around another store's coupon system is more than compensated by the savings in time, stress, and mental energy.
Beyond the "feelings" aspect, I suspect that, as is argued in the article, the coupon code box does lead in some cases to cart abandonment. I've certainly seen the box, gone on a hunt for a coupon, and ended up buying the same item at a different vendor during my hunt many times before.
Personally, I think the best solution for this is either special urls (i.e. www.shop.com/summercoupon), or a "Where did you hear about us" box, which could double as a coupon box, and just an interesting way to gather data about your users. Sure, you'd probably get a lot of garbage, and you'd have to put more effort into parsing the values, but, in addition to not alienating users, you might find some valuable insights as well.
[edited for grammar]
Coupons can give a 100-10,000% lift very easily, enabling web merchants to be less dependent on black Friday/cyber Monday/etc. They can shift demand earlier in the year to even out fulfillment stress and reduce the uncertainty in sales projections.
In the face of realized revenue vs. some perception of unhappiness, sales and marketing will take the buck eleven times out of ten.
Your view of the world is perfectly rational, but that's not how humans behave or think/feel.
> How is it bad customer service when a user literally isn't forced to do anything other than ignore the field if they so choose?
This isn't simply OP's opinion. Some people will get pissed off if they found somebody else just got a better deal. E.g. see recent Paul Graham's essay where he mentions some investors will refuse to invest at valuation $x if they find out another investor got to invest at valuation $0.8x, (with the implicit assumption that they still believe they can make money at the new valuation).
There are a lot of ways to skin the cat, and the most realistic is to use a single field that can take gift cards or promotional coupons. It's easy to bin GCs and look up coupons and the use of a single field (with {apply} and {add} buttons) also reduces the complexity of the payments page.
It's well known that the web has enabled a whole segment of customer often referred to as "the extreme price shopper," who is a person who only buys the promotional item and generally has a negative lifetime value once margins and acquisition costs are factored into their RFM.
Companies do not like ESPs. Abandoned cart processing, which any viable ecommerce system supports, will be able to salvage a number of those transactions as well as indicate where the user exited.
The other option is using third party cookies for sourcing and attribution, which is sloppy, unreliable, and generally creates more affiliate unhappiness (although, honestly, affiliates are generally more trouble than they're worth).
Edit: Thanks, some pretty good results out there.
Providing a code and its attendant price reduction clearly had positive effects on perceptions of fairness and satisfaction when compared to the control group.
...prompting for a code in the absence of having one had negative effects on fairness, satisfaction, and completion when compared to the control. As would be expected from these findings, the three groups were ranked in the predicted order (code > control > no code) for all dependent variables, including intention to repatronize and recommend the online store.
Equity theory, then, becomes an alternative explanation for reactions to code provision and non-provision... the Web buyer without a code experiences the additional impact of the inequity perceived if others are imagined to have a code, are selectively provided one, or are simply viewed as "special" in some sense.
Though I do suspect it A/B tests differently :)
Another thing is there are going to be people that aren't going to put the code in and you would make extra money off of them when they forget to use it. I don't know the percentage of that but it's certainly greater than 0, right?
"In one usability test, removing the coupon code field increased overall conversion from 3.8% to 5.1% (an increase of 34%)."
"We've been tracking you, you're a regular. Here's 5% off for spending ~13min per day on our website from IP 192.168.0.1"
It would give me the creeps.
I think the reason is that while I know somewhere in my mind that Amazon (using them as an example, since I order from them frequently) has a huge quantity of information about me, but it's not something I think about on a day to day basis.
However, the moment they do something to bring my attention to the fact that they have extensive information on me, such as a fictional "you usually buy a movie every Saturday Night, and it's Sunday and you haven't made a purchase, would you like to buy a movie now?" would immediately bring the awareness of their tracking to the front of my mind, and create the associated worry about "just how much do they know about me?"
I know that the answer to that question is "a lot," and enumerating exactly how much they might know about me is a very long process. It makes me question "can I trust Amazon to use this to my advantage, and not theirs?" Even if they never do use it in an "evil" way (which I believe will be the case), the capability is still unsettling to me.
I gave it the data, I know I voluntarily handed it over, and yet I still pause and think "holy crap" sometimes.
Would be interested in seeing some stats/research on whether this is true and how much prices are affected by it.
Of course, you might want to let users know that you do this, and that means emailing them, and that makes this more of an emailed coupon offer, which is back to being more like a traditional coupon approach, but either way hopefully you can give your regulars some warm fuzzies.
(It also means I bought too many shoes at some point in my life.)
Coupon codes are useful for promos and such. Not every customer pays the same amount, thats how the world works.
I love that. In start up land people always seem to ignore things that have been done successfully for years thinking that certainly there is something wrong and legacy business must be making huge mistakes and throwing out their money on things just because "it's the way it's always been done".
The problem of course is understanding which one of those things are wrong and which actually work (to which you really don't need studies) to prove.
The article is from the perspective of a customer without a coupon. In that case, the presence of the coupon code field actually makes you less likely to buy or convert. This article isn;t blaming the methodology. It is saying the status-quo presentation is poor and needs improvement.
On one of our products http://pressbackup.com we have a coupon code, if customers can't find one, and they email me, I will generate one just for them. Those customers stick around for a LONG time.
It frustrates me when I see a coupon code box and cannot find any working codes. Oftentimes the most recent codes for a retailer on RetaiMeNot haven't been active in months or years. On the flip side, when I find a code that saves me anything, even free shipping, I am ecstatic. I feel like I am responsible, thrifty and savvy and I have a proclivity to purchase more items from that retailer later on.
I think these emotions are worth evoking in customers and banning the coupon code box destroys this ability. A referral link doesn't capture as much of the emotional satisfaction as seeing your cart totals drop after typing in a string of characters and clicking "Apply to Cart." Retailers could just hide the coupon code box when there aren't any active coupons. When a coupon is active, the box reappears.
The best way for coupon code boxes to stop appearing is for developers and designers to bring it up with their client. A lot of the time, once the client is actually confronted with it has to make a decision, they choose not to have it.
The solution: don't show the coupon code field or make it extremely easy for consumers to get coupon codes. I've noticed more and more stores put their coupon codes right in the header while you're browsing. So it's impossible NOT to get a coupon.
http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/promo/jpb... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6205769)
By "in the header" you mean on the search-engine results page; don't you?
If you're using voucher codes you shouldn't just use one approach based upon an article like this, rather you should be A/B testing different variants and see what performs for your startup. Your customers aren't the same as everyone else and you shouldn't expect them to behave the same.
Yes! In our case we found it had no effect on conversions and customer service calls increased from people asking about where to enter the (expired) code they found somewhere on the net.
Our solution was to keep the coupon code box and seed a $1 discount code on one of the coupon sites.
We stumble across these wild A/B claims from time to time and in almost every case we've seen no difference in conversions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6204105
http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-mar...
I noticed this on Zappos and the first Google result for "zappos coupon" is this: http://www.zappos.com/truth-about-zappos-coupons
Do you think I will be a returning customer? -no
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.
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.
Sites should definitely keep track of loyal costumers and offer coupons in this manner and allow one to enter then once logged in, but not trouble visiting costumers with this. Letting people know they could have gotten something for cheaper is usually a discouragement from click the "place order" button. I know have definitely just x-ed out of my tab at that point in several occasions.
Walmart has a hard time at their brick and mortar store charging more for diapers to the poor person who lives down the street and has no car to get to competitors, and less to the better off person who arrived by car. But a huge amount of "big data" work is spent differentially pricing online commerce -- the travel industry is most famous for it of course.
The general trend of technology tends to be that tools once only available to the big institutions become democratized and more revolutionary as they are. Similarly I think the "big data" and tracking and etc will swing around into a more equitable balance.
That can be hard to believe, but try to imagine this -- you go to buy something online, but you pay with bitcoin, and a browser plugin you have pops up a screen when you are on the final checkout page -- this plugin uses the bitcoin chains and non-anonymity to show you all recent transactions with that bitcoin address. You can then get an instant sense of whether you are overpaying or getting a deal.
Such a system could be gamed and evaded of course.
At one time I discussed making a reverse-Priceline system, where consumers would use a browser plugin that shared what offers were being accepted and rejected on Priceline style reverse auctions.
The sum total such efforts is a lot of infrastructure invested in replecating what a simple open-outcry market would be, if the market were run by disinterested, trusted authority.
See also this thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6204261
I like petercooper's idea of pre-populating the coupon field with a default code.
Oh really? Refraction and reflection of light, the study of same - that's what matters is it?
Of course not. You mean appearances matter. Name-dropping some physics-sounding word does not make you sound smart, it makes you sound confused and wrong. Optics means optics. It doesn't mean whatever you choose it to mean.
Deliberately misusing words doesn't make you sound cool, it makes you sound like a "Sandwich Artist".
"2. (used with a plural verb) the way a situation, action, event, etc., is perceived by the public or by a particular group of people: The optics on this issue are pretty good for the Democrats. Administrators worry about the bad optics of hiring new staff during a budget crisis."
Since the early 20th century, literally has been widely used as an intensifier meaning “in effect, virtually,” a sense that contradicts the earlier meaning “actually, without exaggeration”
I know the language is being debased. Doesn't mean I like it.
The English language is full of words and phrases that just make writing look more fancy.
You might want to rethink some things.
In short, everything you've said is completely wrong.
1. It was in scare quotes for a reason.
2. That is a stupid job title, not a word.
Someone giving an example of something they don't like said doesn't make them a hypocrite for saying it, especially if they quote it. God sakes.
...See how ridiculous that sounds? If you understood what the author was saying, there's no need to nitpick his use of a single word. Languages change, bud. No amount of bitter internet comments will stop that.
And let's stop shitting on people who work at Subway, kay? Pretty sure they're doing more with their lives than someone who trolls HN to complain about nonsense.
I wasn't shitting on people who work at Subway, I was shitting on their awful, condescending job titles.
And I really just have to ask you to think about what you said.
> Languages change, bud. No amount of bitter internet comments will stop that.
Yes they do. Society changes, too. Companies change. People change. Countries change, laws change. (Oops, another comma splice).
I could re-use your comment to put down any criticism of any change of any kind. Just play around with some issues you care about, replacing the word "Languages" to suit. Feel any different?
> I could re-use your comment to put down any criticism of any change of any kind.
Sure, if my criticism was about something that naturally changes. If I were criticizing trees for losing their leaves, or tides from moving in and out, or potato chips for going stale, you would be completely correct to tell me, "All of those things happen whether you like it or not." Just like I'm correct to tell you, "It's pointless to complain about words finding new meanings."
Yes. The person that came up with the "awful, condescending" job title. You mistake the target of the shitting.
2. A person who, in real terms, is unskilled, and cant
see it, despite thinking they have a 'talent'. The
person often makes inappropriate, obtuse, or
simplistic comments, to everyone elses amusement.
It does not take a degree in linguistics to understand that using someone else's job title in a derogatory manner is shitting on the person with the job title. This is something you should have learned in grade school.
This point has been belaboured far more than it deserves, but for the record I had in mind both the cynical management with their ludicrous, condescending job titles, and any employee naive enough to believe it.
The blogger in question didn't make up the phrase, it's been handed down to him, but he's taken it up with gusto. He's sort of an enthusiastic consumer of the management BS. I hadn't thought of the angle of criticising the poor hard-working minimum wage Subway employees; wasn't my intention. Think Gareth/Dwight from The Office though, wearing his Sandwich Artist badge with obnoxious pride, and that's sort of close.
Anyway, more words have been wasted on this matter than ever it deserved...
How do you distinguish a comma-splice from the grammatically-correct independent-clauses-connected-by-semicolons in speech?
> What would you have written?
Well, assuming I wanted to say what you said, I would replace the commas with semicolons, making it grammatically correct without changing the wording or the implied spoken phrasing.
While people can defend the use, it gives the piece a distracting buzzwordy feel.
I am actually heartened to see it appears to be a politician's fad. Hopefully in 20 years time it will be about as potent as "radical".
Nonetheless, that doesn't put a damper on my nerdy inclination to point out, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
- I run http://DayOnePP.com and sell my inventions there.
- When something goes wrong for a customer you can give the customer a coupon code "sorrykarenhurney" which will give them free shipping or 10% off. This is a great way to win back customers who have had trouble. (You can rename the "Coupon Code" field to be "Customer Service Code" if you use it exclusively for this purpose)
- When I advertise my Calendars or Pens on a design blog I tell the owner that I'll give them an exclusive discount to their readers if they mention my product on the front page. I name the coupon code after the website.
- You can email coupon codes to newsletter members as a reward for signing up for your newsletter.
Although the OP has a legitimate concern, he has never run an online store and doesn't see the behind-the-scenes logic in selectively giving customers discounts. It really is a necessity. Brick & Mortar stores use them even more, but no one gets pissed off at them.
This approach would also allow for implementing coupons in different ways (ex. time-based, limited), reduce mental stress by being able to retry codes till you found a valid coupon (some providers allow for coupon codes but no way to verify it's valid) and not distract from the check-out process (it would simply require showing which of the redeemed coupons are applicable to the purchase).
A plus side of this approach is that a coupon is enough to persuade potential buyers to create accounts to keep their coupon (while it's valid - for later use) and thus also reducing friction in the check-out process which should lead to more sales.
I do also now believe the existing 'coupon' implementation is at fault by leaving too much on the table.
Well, it makes you happy and probably makes it so that you really will proceed with the purchase. "Hey, I spent a looonnng 5 minutes searching AND I got a 10% discount. Why wouldn't I proceed with the purchase?"
For one, you might NOT find the coupon after those "15 minutes". What percentage of users will find it?
Second, if you have to go searching online for 15 minutes, you might be distracted enough to never return, or find something else to buy.
Reading these comments it seems there are a lot of people on Hacker News who seem quite passionate about the idea of getting the best deal they can and not "feeling like a sucker".
Which is fine, but it's definitely a feeling I don't experience. Maybe I'm just weird.
With the topic at hand, having maintained an online shop for a client for several years, I see that they use Coupon Codes as a customer service thing. Didn't like your product? Here's a onetime use 15% off code so you don't hate us. At least that's how they used it. So I always ignore those fields.
This comes at a cost though, see this classic by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
The cost is the trust and goodwill of your customers. People will feel cheated if they find out and hopefully leave you for a competitor who doesn't impose on them the additional mental cost of searching for coupons, finding price engine links with lower prices(#) or whatever.
(#) Some shops actually do that - you get a better price from a price comparison engine than if you search from shop's own site. Talk about treating your trusted customers well.
Otherwise you didn't see it.
The company I worked at that used this did a lot of targeted and 1-off promotions so it seemed to work pretty well.
To me, coupons are always seen as temporary gifts from the company to butter up my loyalty. So paying full price still feels fair.
But again, it's all about metrics. It would be great to see how different audiences respond.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/lessons-from...
Price Discrimination 101.
I'm not sure why this thread has so many people saying that it's a complaint that has no merit. Do you open a new tab and search, or do you just ignore it and carry on with the purchase?
Il you subscribe to their special offer mailing lists you get their coupon codes. Of corse ou get a slap in your face when you see the coupn field box. But this is also where you should say how to get coupon codes.
Propose a subscription to your special coupon offering mailing list where you can also ommunicate about your product. This is opt in advertisement.
The customer wins. Macy's wins.
Let me enter the code right away. Show me what it applies to. Make it easy to use it. Don't make me go thru all the contortions of buying something, unsure of whether the code will apply or not - and pissing me off if it doesn't after all that.
https://blogjet.cleverbridge.com/9/?scope=checkout&product=1...
It's not an ideal solution, but I believe this additional step helps a bit.
Now that I think of it, maybe even better strategy would be to buy a domain "blabla-coupon-code.com" and put there a coupon code for your thing with a small discount. People who like to search the web for coupons will be satisfied ;)
Coupons codes are usually part of ad campaigns.
Or even pre-filling the input box with the generic code?
Seems like that way, everyone can feel good, and some can feel even better.
p.s. Oh wait. I should probably file a B.S. patent for this idea. Unless someone has already has.
As a first time customer, you are not being "cheated". You are just a lot more expensive.
"Do you have a gift card or promotional code?" Y/N, and then only show the field if yes is selected.
It might also offend you to know people in different countries pay more or less for a product.
ie. Hosting in the USA is far more expensive than Europe for some mysterious reason
Because it was a pain to manage millions of coupon codes on legacy catalog fulfillment systems. In fact, it's still not particularly easy.
Way back in the day, mail order retailers would send out millions of catalogs to current and prospective customers. To get these people to order, they would include coupons as an incentive. The coupons generally involved a short code indicating the mailing and a number indicating a segment. So, you'd get something like SU95615, which would translate to Spring 1995 segment 615. Segment 615 could be part of your own list or it might be part of a list you were renting. When the orders came in the codes would be used to tie back the promotional mailing spend to the revenue, thus allowing the retailer to score a list or segment.
So why not use individual codes and then roll up? More sophisticated companies did that. In fact, some would even have SKUs that had prefixes tied to the mailing allowing for some very deep analysis. However, most did not and it was primarily due to the fact that their systems were not designed to handle such customization. In fact, some would basically choke on that much data.
When these companies moved online, they took the practice of using coupon codes right along with them. As new companies without the legacy issues came along, they adopted the old ways and the cycle continued.
This is why these companies do this to their customers. Is it right? Of course not, but that's the way it is.
That said, there are better ways to handle this need to promote and track marketing dollars. Lots and lots of ways.
Here are a few I've tried. Each one works pretty well:
1. Using specific links in email promotions with codes already embedded: This is probably the best way to go. Customer get the code applied. No need to show the field at all. This is great for targeted promotions.
2. Using business logic to apply a discount automatically: In this scenario, there is no codebox either. The system figures out the right discount based on the promotion. This is good if you're giving account-based promotions or doing something site wide.
3. Single-use, unique codes: This is a special code that can only be used once (ideally by a specific person). This method has the added benefit of being a marketing tool in and of itself (i.e. you can tell the customer they are special because the code is made special just for them). Great for email and print catalogs.
In each case, there was a measured conversion improvement. In some cases, it was quite significant. However, I would strongly recommend testing. You're at the bottom of the conversion funnel here; caution is advised.
You may discover, as JC Penney did, that your customer base has certain expectations and that changing those learned behaviors is more difficult than you might expect. You may find that removing the coupon field generates more customer service requests (i.e. "Where do I put in my coupon?") You may also discover that your marketing department has no clue about how to tie your ingenious solution back into their demand generation. You may also discover that your systems are not well-suited to carrying so much additional data.
It's complicated but from my experience I'd have to say it's worth the effort to solve. Not only will your customers have a better experience, but you'll have better data about those customers and the sources you're tapping to bring new ones in the door.
Of course, be prepared for lots of complaints from the coupon stackers. Those guys really don't like it when you remove the field.
First of all, giving everyone a referral URL works great in a web only world but what if you're advertising on a Podcast (or gasp print or radio), is it easier to tell people to type in www.mysite.com/coupon to their browser or is it easier to tell people to enter COUPON at checkout?
Secondly, the amount of people who are going to have this adverse reaction to the mere existence of the coupon code field is vanishingly small. Most customers who don't have a code will just ignore it and move on (and actually many who have been told about a code will not even use it) only a small minority will bother searching for a code to enter when they don't have one.
Whatever web site had a coupon code field that made you this angry probably had at least 20 much worse UI violations they should prioritize above trying to eliminate the coupon field.
Or... if you're feeling really adventurous, use an audio hyperlink ;) http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/08/apple-developing-audio-hype...
One might offend your eyes, the other (can be) more personal.
But of course that's not the world we live in. Our mailboxes get stuffed full of coupons. We get them on our receipts. We get them in our e-mail. We get them in newspapers and magazines and even attached to the very products we're buying.
We're all used to the concept. Roughly nobody is getting upset at the idea that there might be some coupon out there that they don't happen to have at the moment.
If you have the checker might have grabbed a copy of the Sunday insert they had sitting there and scanned the $1 off coupon for that one item you happened to pick up but didn't know was actually on sale, or 95% of the time the checker doesn't even bother you about such things. By offering a coupon code box on your checkout page, you're effectively saying "Hey, we might have put a coupon in last Sunday's newspaper, but obviously you aren't special enough to have received it and we aren't going to be nice by offering it to everyone to gain customer loyalty."
If you want to do an affiliate-type discount for a single item, do it through URL parameters stored into a cookie and consumed at checkout. If you want to do a Sunday-coupon-type discount for anyone willing to go find a coupon, offer it to everyone: "Do you have any coupons? Our latest promotions can be found at ..."
Edit: and if doing a Sunday-type coupon, have the box be conditionally shown. If your current promotion is for 10% off the purchase of a Foo widget, don't show it when the customer only has Bar sprockets in their cart. You're just losing conversion at that point.
The difference is the knowledge that there is a coupon for the particular item I'm buying, and the (in)convenience of finding that coupon.
I'm convinced that many, many people are "upset" about the idea that they're missing out on coupons. My wife is one of those people, she can't buy anything on the internet without searching her coupon sites first. And I know a lot of people like her. For me, it takes a conscious decision that "this is not worth it, I'll just pay whatever the price is and save the time and energy".
Yes, and I am sick to the back teeth of this crap in my mailbox and encouraging me to keep bits of paper in my wallet yadda yadda. Coupons suck ass and I make a point of preferring retailers that don't use them.
BTW this isn't 'the world that we live in.' This is a largely American phenomenon. In many European countries you can tell the mail carrier that you don't accept junk mail.
Another study found that removing the promo code box improved conversion from 3.8% to 5.1%
Source: http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/11365
(There's also some good shopping cart / checkout UX tips in there too)
However that was still reduced and delayed revenue for the vendor over not having the box. And how many times have I completely given up… Lots.
But, I still get your point. Ridiculous shipping charges has definitely led to me abandoning a cart more often then coupon code boxes. Although, I still prefer it when sites just tell me what the shipping is before I put the item in my cart. Not telling me before I have to fill in anything more than a zip code tends to be a sign of high shipping charges and sometimes leads to me going to a competitors website without even checking what it will cost to ship.
Instinctively I agree with the author: when a customer has effectively made a purchase decision, a webshop shouldn't divert him to random pages on the internet, unless there is a mechanism in place that leads to extra sales. Showing a coupon box during one of the final phases of the purchasing process is a way of diverting customers to random pages on the internet.
I go searching for a code. I find a few great ones that have expired but nothing active right now. Now I can continue my purchase and feel like a chump or abandon my cart. The latter usually wins.
- Go to buy a product, get all the way up to the checkout and abandon for an unrelated reason - Go back and purchase the product at full price - Get an email with a discount code for abandoning my cart the first time
Left a very unpleasant feeling of being stooged. If I'd only known to abandon my cart first...
And if you want to be focused purely on the bottom line; conversions were just as high without it automatically filled in but coupon usage was notably lower; meaning automatically filling in the coupon was just giving away money.
A also suspect this is why when you Google "landsend coupons" the #1 site is a UGC coupon-sharing site and #2 is the merchant's own site. By every traditional measure, the merchant's page should outrank the coupon site.
Why would you trust a coupon sharing site more? The merchant has an incentive to only give you some token discount, whereas the "crowd" has no such incentive. So you're more likely to trust the crowd in this scenario.
What are you filling it in with and what type of discount did the coupon apply to the purchase?
So are you saying that for the purposes of testing you took a loss on the sale in order to see if there was abandonment?
We did not take any losses.
(I'm not saying this "training" is a net win for the seller, but I can see "loyalty" as one of their goals.)
Another study found that removing the promo code box improved conversion from 3.8% to 5.1%"
Didn't read the study but I wonder if those numbers take into account the positive benefit of using the coupon box.
In other words you do a promotion offering a discount to increase sales. The result of the promotion is an increase of x but also a decrease of y because of abandonment. It seems (by the way you phrase the summary) that the study only concluded the negative aspect and not the upside to the coupon code. (Once again I didn't read the study so I am just asking.)
We use coupon codes to track our marketing efforts.
advanceautoparts or something. was buying from them, got to the checkout, searched for coupons, found that they have 25%+ coupons going on year around.
I can't possibly buy from a site that has all it's prices upmarked by at least 25% to begin with.
I guess you don't buy much, then.
I find it handy, because I can place an order online and pick it up at the store. But I usually get 20% off. Hmm...
Look at other reasons people abandoned carts in that PayPal/Comscore study:
Wanted to comparison shop: 37%
Lack of money: 36%
Wanted to look for a coupon: 27%
Wanted to shop offline: 26%
Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24%
Item unavailable at checkout: 23%
Couldn’t find customer support: 22%
Security concerns: 21%
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Sad-Tale-of-Abandoned-Shopp...
When you look at the big picture findings from this survey, it makes you realize: 20-40% of people will abandon a cart for ANY reason.
And none of these "studies" have looked into what the conversion rates for people who DO use coupons are. When you introduce a coupon to a good customer, or at the right moment, does that INCREASE conversions? I'd would bet good money the answer is yes. And I would bet you money that that increase outweighs the seemingly random "25% of people quit a cart for every possible reason."
There is no such thing as a one-sided effect.
BTW -- abandoning a cart is not the same thing as quitting a checkout in progress. Beginning the checkout process is a much bigger indicator of intention than putting stuff in your cart. Many people just put stuff in their cart as a kind of shopping list, or "I might want to look at this more later." Which is no doubt why cart abandonment rates are so high.
I wrote the post from an anecdotal POV, and just started digging into the research once the discussion came up here. ;)
On further inspection, here is some research that might support my point:
- Oliver & Shor found that: "prompting for a code in the absence of having one had negative effects on fairness, satisfaction, and completion when compared to the control." http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/promo/jpb...
- This study by Oliver & Swan (1989) found a big link between a consumer's perception of pricing fairness, and their overall satisfaction with a purchase. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1251411?uid=3737720&ui...
- Xia, Monroe, & Cox found: "For price comparisons, the other-customer comparison has the greatest effect on perceived price unfairness because of the salience of such a comparison" http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/weitz/mar7786/Articles/price%...
- This study by Google found that in a real-world setting, "that more than 40% of shoppers have left a retail store without purchasing because they knew they left a coupon at home". http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/from-clipping-t...
Only lots of the companies that uses this practice never advertise on podcasts or radio.
>Secondly, the amount of people who are going to have this adverse reaction to the mere existence of the coupon code field is vanishingly small.
Citation needed.
>Most customers who don't have a code will just ignore it and move on
Of course, since there is nothing else they can do. The issue is if this leaves a bad taste on their mouth or not.
>Whatever web site had a coupon code field that made you this angry probably had at least 20 much worse UI violations they should prioritize above trying to eliminate the coupon field.
He could not care less about other UI violations compared to feeling a second-rate customer that has to pay more.
But then why have coupons and just offer money off to everyone?
Why would you offer a discount to people when you can make more money by not offering a discount? To me I see the coupon as a reward to the people that know about it. Plus if it's a promotion you are probably increasing the volume and taking away the price comparison for people that like to save. Plus maybe some loyalty knowing those guys always haave coupons.
Take GoDaddy for instance. They always have promotions running. If someone just wanted to purchase a domain they would go on there and pay $12 but if they wanted to save money they could drive the price down to as low as $2.49 (in some cases). They are not losing money at that price and will even make more in the long run since they didn't lose you to namecheap and for the rest of the time you own it with them you will be paying $8-10 with the convenience of auto-renew.
If you think this blog post looks familiar, it is.
People are different. I do what he described every single time I see the coupon code when I wouldn't have thought about searching for one. I would have been happily enjoying my purchase instead to cruising junky ad filled sites looking for a discount.
It's simple loss aversion. Instead of people seeing their purchase as a gain, they think about what they're losing by not having a coupon.
This research paper studies those effects: http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/promo/jpb...
For me, not having the box would have meant I "knew" I was getting the best deal. Having the box and failing to find a code means I "failed" at getting the best deal, even if there wasn't a better deal to be had.
Finding a code sometimes makes me think, "am I allowed to use it?" but of course, I'd try anyway and yes, can be pleased if I get the magical 10-15% off.
"Slum it! Enter your poverty code here:"
But if the code is targeted at a specific set of customers that I know I don't fall into, then I would probably overlook.
Things like:
- Student discount
- Over 60s discount
- Job seekers discount
But finding the right label that doesn't offend, and right way to validate the authenticity of the customer's eligibility, is no trivial task.
Imagine you're side by side with a guy in two checkout lines and by chance you have the same 6 items. Both of you get rung up and it comes out to $100 on the display. At that point, you reach for your card. The other guy though, reaches over to the cashier and does a wiggly weird handshake. The cashier smiles knowingly, hits a button and boom it says $86. You've got no recourse to complain. The items you picked up were clearly marked and you accepted the total amount. You start to notice how every 5th person does the goofy weird handshake? Feel like shopping there again next time?
But you don't need to imagine it because it happens all the time and you still shop in stores.
You hit the nail on the head with the first part of your comment -- you decided they weren't worth the time, and therefore you don't save the money. You don't huffily dump your items and leave the line. No, you think, "Hm, maybe I should clip coupons next time." (Although, of course, you don't.)
I guess the risk of using an analogy is they eventually break down if you go too crazy on them. I made it a "real world" example to look at the online experience another way so that people could perhaps relate to the original's author pet peeve. I think if the author of this original article felt like he understood how to get a coupon for the site he was on and decided not to anyway he wouldn't have written the article. Subtle but important point here.
The article doesn't even suggest getting rid of coupons, it suggests putting them in a different spot.
On the other hand, if I buy something at Bed, Bath and Beyond or almost any clothing retailer without a 20% off coupon, I do indeed feel like a chump. If the cashier in a store I've never been in before asks 'do you have any coupons?' after ringing me up, I definetly feel like I've screwed up, but I'll still finish my purchase because, well, instant gratification and societal expectations and all that. But I'm not going to go back to that store until I DO have coupon.
So maybe it depends. If your shtick is 'Never pay full price and find ridiculous discounts,' coupon fields might be the way to go, as long as you always have coupons available. But if you expect even some customers to pay full price, having your cashiers ask everyone for coupons is probably not the best practice.
Biggest one is Bed Bath Beyond. If for some reason Amazon can't wait and I need it now, no way in hell am I buying a product from that store w/o the 20% off coupon
Why would they? Moreover, why would I want to complain?
Are coupons really that egregious to you?
1) I personally have abandoned checkout carts when I realized they offered big discounts and I didn't have one right then. 2) Alternatively, the coupon code box has very often reminded me to go find a coupon - and pay less than I was already willing to pay.
My behavior is normal human behavior. You can debate whether (1) is "logical," but the checkout process should maximize profit from real human beings, not theoretically logical ones.
The checkout page should have the lowest friction possible. Coupon boxes make people hunt for them. Anytime a customer leaves your store there's a chance they may not come back. This applies to physical stores too.
> is it easier to tell people to type in www.mysite.com/coupon to their browser or is it easier to tell people to enter COUPON at checkout?
I hear URLs spelled out in radio ads all the time. If this were 1996 you might have a valid point, but not in 2013.