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)

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.

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.

- 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...

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.

(I'm not saying this "training" is a net win for the seller, but I can see "loyalty" as one of their goals.)

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

This research paper studies those effects: http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/promo/jpb...

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.

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.

The article doesn't even suggest getting rid of coupons, it suggests putting them in a different spot.

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.

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?

Or... if you're feeling really adventurous, use an audio hyperlink ;) http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/08/apple-developing-audio-hype...

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.

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.

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.

One might offend your eyes, the other (can be) more personal.

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.