Marketing pro chiming in here - this is done so the marketing departments of all these companies can claim credit for driving a ton of sales.

The people who are working at these big legacy retailers in 2018 tend to not be very sophisticated about online marketing. I'm being polite with that understatement.

So nobody calls out the marketing departments on this because there is so much political BS going on anyway as everybody is scratching and clawing for their piece of an ever shrinking pie.

I worked in a similar situation and I wanted to stop working with these coupon sites for the obvious reasons you pointed out. I got overruled by higher ups and I later came to learn that my complaints about this practice were a career limiting move.

They just want to be able to take credit for driving a ton of sales even though everybody with half a brain realizes they are not generating new sales. They are simply cannibalizing the business because the vast majority of the time these people would buy at full price anyway if their Google search never turned up a coupon.

100% this. I think people who have not worked directly in marketing dramatically underestimate just how much of marketing at a big company is taking credit for sales that were going to happen anyways. People have performance driven bonuses/promotions/whatever, TRULY generating demand is very hard, taking credit for sales you didn’t drive is WAY easier, and most companies have very feeble checks and balances against this.

For example, talk to anyone running Google AdWords campaigns, they’ll tell about “branded” vs “unbranded” search terms, and how you should treat them all as one big bucket. They’ll say the unbranded terms generate demand, while the branded terms are the “closers.” This is PURE BS. “Branded terms” are literally someone searching for “Jira”, clicking the ad that takes you to Jira instead of the top non-ad link right below it, buying Jira, then saying “they bought it because of the ad.” Unbranded is people searching for “issue tracking software”, seeing a Jira ad, clicking it, then buying. That’s legit, but likely the CAC for unbranded is like 2-5x the LTV of the customer, and totally not worth it. But if you lump it together with the “branded” ads (people literally searching for your exact product, and randomly deciding to click the ad over the legit search result right below it), the CAC looks great. Marketing is FULL of BS like this.

If your competitors are advertising for your name, they will close many of your potential customers. Unfortunately, Google pushes everyone to do branded ads this way.

Isn't this a useful form of price discrimination, though? The coupons allow you to sell your products at full price to those who are price insensitive, while also allowing you to sell at a discount to price-sensitive buyers. Only the latter are willing to go to the hassle of looking up the coupon codes.

My wife installed a plug-in on our family computer that looks up coupon codes for you at checkout time. But often they don't work, so I don't even bother with them. To me, that suggests that even if its 'easy' to find the coupon codes, the coupons still work as a form of price discrimination.

Favoring those who are price sensitive isn't necessarily benefitting those who are less wealthy (this wasn't explicitly stated, but it's often implied in praises of price discrimination, please let me know of this isn't what you meant with this comment). Wealthier people often have time to find better prices, or have others find better prices for them. Also, people with better information skills are often better at identifying the best price (and people with such skills tend to be better off in general). A poor person balancing several jobs may not have much time to research prices.

On priniciple I'm usually okay with rewarding diligence and thoughtfulness, but penalising those who lack the ability to perform this diligence and thoughtfulness may not be the best thing in this case.

The comment I was responding to was implying that coupons were an outdated marketing strategy. I was saying that I think it can help companies achieve higher margins by selling at higher prices to wealthier customers, while still achieving sales at lower (but still profitable) prices with less wealthy customers.

I wasn't making any comment on the social good of price discrimination. I agree with you that some pricing strategies (buying in bulk, buying without loans/interest, rewards cards, etc) may tend to reward the wealthy. But that wasn't related to the point I was trying to make. I was trying to say that coupons seem like they could still be a useful marketing strategy for improving companies average margins per sale.

Which plugin are you referring to that you don't bother with? The main one I know of is honey, which is automated, and takes about ten seconds while they run through the most popular, and if you choose to continue they'll run through the full list of recently valid coupons which adds at most another twenty seconds. 30 seconds of time to save 10 to 30 percent most of the time is worth it to me. The only time I ever think to skip the check is on sites like Amazon or Wal-Mart where the majority of coupons are for very specific items. But even on sites like Jet and Target I often get lucky.

Yes, I think it is honey.

You are right that it isn't that much effort to try it. I find it annoying because they never seem to work for me. In a world where our behavior is closely tracked, I have come to wonder if the coupons don't work for me because some algorithm has figured out that I don't care.

Which actually takes things full circle from the original comment I was responding to: I wonder if online coupons are now so sophisticated that they can _only_ be offered to the price sensitive. If so, I suspect even more strongly that they are still a good/relevant marketing strategy.

There's also brand image to consider. Constant sales or coupons affect that (and good luck dropping those once customers are used to it). Maybe it makes sense in some cases though? Vice versa for others.

What's their opinion of Apple, for example? Would they operate the same way there?

One of my businesses doesn't have an affiliate program nor do we offer public coupons, yet coupon sites still have dozens of fake coupons from us along with fake usage counts on the coupons and fake reviews.

Since they can't cookie stuff on us to make money they are just trying to get additional eyeballs for ads by organically ranking for anyone searching for a coupon for my brand.

Thanks very much: we have been completely mystified at what these sites are doing by listing fake coupons for our business too. So basically it's just black-hat SEO; I should have guessed.

The way I see it, coupons are about giving a discount to people willing to jump through hoops, in order to do price discrimination.

Personally, if I am checking out and I see a place for a coupon code and I can't find one, I feel like I'm overpaying. It usually wouldnt save me more than a couple of bucks but if it's something I was on the fence about buying anyway it can make me abandon my cart.

Well, assuming you don't get a place to enter your coupon code until checkout, that means you'd already decided that the listed price was worth it for whatever you were buying, right?

I often take a sale just to the checkout, to get an accurate picture of what shipping & taxes will be added.

"Shopping cart abandonment" is a specifically targeted "thing", and it's not unusual to get emails "reminding" me that I "forgot" that last crucial step of actually transacting.

I hate the is way of arguing. You don't decided that XX dollars is fair -- you decide that XX dollars, given everything you know, is fair. So XX dollars, if that is the best price might be okay, but XX dollars, given that there is a coupon or a sale next month is not a fair price.

I often take things through to checkout, even if I'm fairly sure I'm _not_ buying, as it's the easiest way to find out how much shipping is going to be added (this is especially true when I'm shopping on Amazon Japan or PayPal internationally, as going through to checkout is the only way to trigger the currency conversion).

Edit: It can also work the other way though - I've decided I'll purchase, see a coupon code box and think I might as well check (when I wouldn't have thought to otherwise), and ended up paying half the price (it was a monthly service though, and it made me less likely to cancel it when I wasn't using it as much, so they probably won in the end).

That's not necessarily true. I think most people, including me, assume that most retailers have some kind of coupon system and don't need to see a coupon field to think about coupons.

Anecdotally, there's been cases in the past where I see a product as valuable but overpriced, and a coupon makes the difference between a sale and a pass. I will go to the checkout screen with the product to try some coupons and see if they work, not having yet made the decision to proceed with the purchase.

"Most likely you'll end up checking out anyway even if you don't find any valid coupons"

I think that's quite an assumption. I have no data either way, but personally I'll rarely make a spur of the moment purchase without something pushing me over the edge. Those £60 sneakers? Pass. Those £60 sneakers with 20% off? Yeah, ok then.

> Those £60 sneakers with 20% off? Yeah, ok then.

How often do you find that those £60 sneakers were "on sale" for 20% off on one site, while being "full price" at £48 on other sites?

It's pretty common for me. There's much less variation in the price something is selling for than in the amount of "discount" you're supposedly getting.

I agree. I regularly fill carts expecting to find a coupon or abandon. At the same time, just make your coupons easily accessible on your site via a google search and save yourself some money. I have noticed this is becoming a trend and use it to avoid one more chance of malware on myrandomcoupons.com.

I work with a retailer who displays a coupon on every product page and it does cut down a lot of the normal brand+coupon searches - though there are a hard core who'll always look (unsuccesfully) for a better coupon off-site.

Sort of like how in Safeway every single bottle of wine is "on-sale". I know it works on many (most?) people but if something is always on sale isn't just for sale?

Describes about 80% of UK retail atm.

Michaels (the craft store) does this. And if you’re not getting 40% off at least one item with every purchase, you’re paying too much. Sort of like bed bath and beyond’s ubiquitous 20% off coupons, but online.

I did this a few hours ago. Without a coupon I moved on.

One of Australia’s largest online retailers agrees with you. https://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-ma...

Couldn’t the retailer just look up when the cookie was set? If it was set during some window before the user had items in their cart, pay the affiliate. If it was set after, or long in the past, don’t pay.

Then it's a game of trying to find ways to not pay your affiliates. Do you want to be the retailer than gets known in the affiliate space for trying to find loopholes not to pay what they said they would? People would stop promoting your site. You might as well shut down your affiliate program if you're going to not pay your affiliates sometimes.

It doesn’t look like these guys (or most “affiliates”) are actually promoting the site or driving traffic. They’re just dipping their spoons in the existing money river.

I have considered this as a possibility when it comes to shopping through affiliate portals (such as a credit card) in order to get bonus points.

I usually open a private window to mitigate them doing something less the super sophisticated.

In my case, I can often get the same item (or similar quality item) for same or near price, I value the extra points a retailer that participates through the affiliate program provides, and I choose that retailer.

It's fairly common for people to abandon the cart and come back later to complete the purchase, not always coupon related. Especially true with non-impulse purchases costing 3 figures or more.

> They can easily fix this by only paying out affiliate revenue for actual, legitimate affiliates, those that brought you a brand new customer.

Not so easy. New customers like to shop with coupons too. There's certainly no guarantee (or, in my opinion, even a likelihood) that only awarding affiliate commission for new customers would rule out coupon purchases. I personally always scout around for discounts and coupon codes before shopping anywhere - it has nothing to do with whether it's my first purchase or not.

> If the user already spent time browsing your website and built up a shopping cart, don't pay out affiliate revenue even if they do end up clicking on an affiliate link after.

I think this makes more sense without the "even" word. Also, if the link was clicked on before the cart was built up, a commission would be in order.

I have a browser plugin that informs me if Amazon products are cheaper elsewhere and will apply coupon codes for me. So at least in my specific case a retailer might lure me away from Amazon and to their site for a particular sale.

Does Amazon make sellers price item lower or equal to their own store fronts? This might mean that small brand owners or white labelers might not be able to offer same item on their own store front for price they offer on Amazon.

Some amazon affiliate must be making nice commissions on that plugin!

They are likely an affiliate for every site they recommend. My default for online shopping has been Amazon for a while, but I'm more and more frequently being pulled to Walmart and other sites. Tools like this plugin are a big reason for that.

This is bold and terrible idea. Affiliate programs encourage members to bring users, no matter through coupons or blog posts or other legit means. They have no idea if a user is coming because of a coupon or other reasons, how can they exclude this type of sites?

Besides, even if like you said a user is ready to buy something, there could be better coupons from rival retailers which bring the user to the site and look for the same product. Isn't this what a lot of retailers want? Using better coupons to bring users from competitors site?

There are many other scenarios, without considering those and just make the decision is really bad.

There are valid reasons for paying an affiliate to bring existing customers back to your site.

That said, affiliate networks expend a huge amount of resources into convincing retailers that coupons bring incremental sales. Reason being, it gives them an opportunity to plant cookies with every sale the retailer makes, not just those driven by a legitimate affiliate.

It also generates a feeling of urgency - buy now before the coupon expires.

You could say sales do the same thing, but online sales are so overused that I personally disregard them because I figure the store will have another fake sale soon anyway.

Online sales are not designed to get you to buy something BECAUSE there is a sale, they exist so you can feel better about paying for products you were ALREADY looking to buy. Yes, there is a little bit of a final push due to a sale but it’s not the primary reason. Source: I’m a CRO person and manipulate shopping behavior for a living.

Simple: price discrimination.

Coupons allow you to selectively target price-sensitive customers with lower prices, resulting in better matching of your price to buyer's willingness to pay.