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It's MOS. Manufactured Outrage Syndrome and its what people in tech do. They see something they personally dislike, decide the world should work a different way, and then write a blog post arguing for it.

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.

What? No. This was actually studied, with data and everything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6205769

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11363/do-promo-codes-o...

I wrote the post from an anecdotal POV, and just started digging into the research now. ;)

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...

I don't think it's absurd at all. As other commenters have mentioned, seeing the coupon code box and not having a coupon gives me (personally) a feeling of remorse before I've even bought what I was shopping for. This should concern you, as a merchant, because ideally you'd like your users to associate good feelings with shopping on your site.

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]

What people say and what people pay are not strongly correlated. :-)

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.

>First, I'd like to point out that his suggestion is fucking absurd. Without codes, there would be no way to discern between methods of customer acquisition

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.

I think you'd enjoy Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, or any other popular book on behavioral economics. (Even better: Dan's Coursera class.)

Your view of the world is perfectly rational, but that's not how humans behave or think/feel.

I upvoted you because of your first paragraph. But OP's suggestion isn't absurd. One might still offer coupons while not making the option obvious to people who don't have one.

> 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).

I shop at Trader Joes for preference because there are no coupon codes to collect, no loyalty cards to remember, and the prices are consistently good. The food quality is outstanding, I the selection is excellent, and they're plenty busy. Also, my understanding is that their employees are paid far better than those at other grocery chains, and they're certainly smarter, more cheerful, and helpful.

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.

I agree that source codes, affiliate ids, landing pages, and the like are necessary to track and reconcile sources from campaigns and third parties.

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).