Put yourself in the mind of your customer. You've had a look around the site, decided to buy at the price displayed and are proceeding through the checkout. Then you see it...
Gift Vouchers/Discount Coupons
Enter Redeem Code ____________________
What? Does that mean that other people get this product cheaper?
So do I just ignore it and continue to buy because I haven't got a code?
Or do I decide to do a quick search on merchantname voucher or
merchantname coupon to see if I can find a voucher and save myself some dollars?
Let's try that. What are the likely outcomes?
a) I search but don't find anything and maybe return to complete my purchase, or maybe go to another shop I happened across on the search.
b) I find a coupon website in the search results, click on that and...
... see no coupons but there are similar sites with coupons so I go there, or
... find the shop but there's no coupon (is this false advertising?), or
... find the shop with an out of date coupon (annoying?), or
... find the shop and coupon, go back to the shop and type it in.
If your customer ever gets to that final stage of returning to your shop and typing in the coupon code, it may or may not be valid. If it's invalid and the customer doesn't get their discount after all their messing around, what will they think? If it is valid, you have just risked a sale and given a customer a discount when if you had left them alone, they'd most likely have just completed the purchase at full price.
To add insult to your injury, as well as giving the customer an unnecessary discount, you will find that...
- you've probably paid affiliate commission to the site that you prompted your ready customer to go and look for, and the cost of that commission is on top of the cost of the discount to the customer
- if it was a valid coupon intended to track a print advertisement, your conversion figures will be inflated by these people who have never seen the print publication.
- if the coupon affiliate cookie overwrite a genuine refering affiliates cookie, you've paid the wrong affiliate for the sale so you risk losing the type of affiliate that introduces new customers and create sales.
So, why is the request for the coupon code on your shopping cart there? Do you really use it? Was it just an option on your shopping cart that was left there just in case? Is it working for you or against you?
If you want to use incentives or vouchers to track sales, or special offers to encourage sales or bigger baskets, there may be better ways to do it.
