When you are making a purchase online and come to a page in the shopping cart where they ask you to enter a discount code or coupon code, how do you feel?
If you have a code, you probably feel quite good. If you don’t, you’ll likely feel you are about to pay more than you need to.
We have yet to research this topic, but it might be an interesting area to test. What is the net impact of offering discount codes? Does the increase in conversion of those who do have a code offset the potential loss in conversion of those who don’t, and feel short-changed?
As for “where” you can get your hands on the code number, here is an example of how things can go wrong, as decribed in a recent article by Jack Aaronson.
“I’ve been on several sites lately that have ads on the front page for special discounts. The ads contained promo codes, which the user had to enter during the checkout process. The ads were graphical, so there was no way to copy and paste long codes into the correct box during checkout. I would have had to write them down and enter them manually. That’s a barrier.”
