> Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?
I get that this can be annoying but plenty of companies do A/B tests and find that it works for them. I suppose it could mean they're just following some fad and don't know what's going on, but it doesn't have to mean that. This is especially true for companies that have long sales cycles or are in categories where lots of comparison shopping is common. Getting someone into your email funnel can be more important than anything else.
> Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying?
Where else in the funnel would you have them apply their coupon? Maybe my perspective is different because we do a lot of offline advertising, but if someone comes into the site off of a print coupon they're going to expect to be able to put it in somewhere and get their discount. If we don't put it in the order flow they're either going to not purchase or we're going to get a lot of customer service calls from people trying to redeem their coupons.
One big mistake businesses make is seeing another business doing something and assuming it must be working. Which is one of the points the OP was making.
I've seen this type of thing improve conversion immensely at a startup I worked at, and it sets up the starts of a drip marketing campaign.
Many of these are the natural results of A/B testing and experimentation, which is why many companies arrive at the same result.
Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?
Those companies paying for clicks to 404 pages or 'this item is out of stock', etc?
Those companies that ask you if you have a discount coupon just before you enter your card details for something you are already buying?
I get your point but I wouldn't assume big companies always know what the are doing when it comes to advertising. Sometimes they employ lots of people and some of those people don't actually have a clue what they are doing.