The Coupon Code Box That Sends Shoppers Searching

An empty box at the last step

A shopper has filled a cart, typed a shipping address and reached the payment page. Above the total sits an empty white box labelled Promo code, with an Apply button beside it.

She has no code. Until that moment she was happy with the price. Now she knows that somebody, somewhere, is paying less for the same order.

So she opens a new tab and searches for the shop's name and the word coupon. From that moment, the checkout is no longer about her order.

What a search for a code turns up

The results are rarely the shop's own pages. They are coupon sites that list codes for almost every online shop, whether or not those codes ever existed.

• Expired codes from a sale that ended months ago.
• Codes that never worked, listed because someone guessed them.
• Offers from other shops, including your competitors.
• Advertising, sometimes from a competitor bidding on your name.
• Prompts to install a browser add-on that hunts for codes.

She tries three codes and none works. By then she has seen a rival's advertisement for the same product, and her cart is two tabs away.

Some shoppers come back and pay full price, a little annoyed. Others buy from the advertisement, or close the tabs and forget the whole thing.

Why the box changes how a price feels

A price feels fair until the shopper learns there is a lower one. The empty box is a notice that a lower price exists and that she has not been given it.

The effect is strongest on new customers, who have no newsletter and no history with the shop. They are the people a business works hardest to reach, and the box greets them with doubt.

Regular customers who never receive codes notice it too, and can start to feel they pay full price for their loyalty.

Hide the box behind a small link

The box should not simply disappear. People with a code need somewhere to enter it, and without one they write to ask, or abandon the order in frustration.

Replace the open box with a small text link near the order total, which opens the box when clicked. Shoppers with a code find it; others hardly notice it.

Naming the source in the link, such as Newsletter code, tells everyone else that nothing public has been missed.

Most shop systems can show the field this way. Some need a small change from whoever built the shop.

Codes that arrive in the link

When you send a code to your mailing list, the code can travel inside the link. The reader clicks the button in the email and arrives at the shop with the discount already in the cart.

The cart should say so plainly, naming the discount and the amount. The shopper never copies, remembers or types anything, and never wonders whether it worked.

Many shop systems support links like this, and others can be set up to accept them. Test every link on a phone and on a desktop computer before a mailing goes out.

Sale prices on the product page

A sale open to everyone does not need a code. Show the reduced price beside the old one, on the product page and again in the cart, so nobody has to find or type anything.

Codes then mean something specific: a thank you to subscribers, a reward for a referral, an offer handed out at a market. People who have one know where it came from.

A sale price shown on the page also leaves nothing for coupon sites to copy and pass around.

A worked example

A small wool mill on Vancouver Island spins yarn from local fleece and sells it, with blankets and knitting kits, at the farm gate and through its own online shop.

A few times a year it emails subscribers a code for a seasonal sale. Its checkout showed a large Promo code box all year round, between the cart and the payment button.

Customers emailed asking for a code they had heard existed, and a search for the mill's name with the word coupon returned pages of codes the mill had never issued.

The box is now a small link reading Newsletter code, under the order total. Newsletter buttons carry the code in the link, and the cart confirms the discount before payment.

During sales, reduced prices show on every product page. An expired code now brings a polite message naming the current offer, rather than a red error.

A shopper who arrives without a code sees a checkout with nothing missing from it, so there is nothing to go and find.

Keeping the checkout about the order

The code box is one of several things that pull shoppers out of a checkout. Others include the full site menu above the payment form, social media buttons and shipping costs revealed only at the last step.

Every link away from the checkout is a way out of it. A checkout showing the order, the shipping cost, the total and the payment fields, with little else, keeps attention where it belongs.

Shipping costs in particular belong early, on product pages or in the cart, so the last step brings no surprises.

The counter-case

Some shops are built around codes. A business that hands them out at markets, through partner shops or on a podcast may find most buyers arrive with one, and they need a box they can find at once.

For that shop a visible field is right. Place it below the order summary, label it with where codes come from, and keep it small.

The principle holds either way: make it easy to use a code you have, and give no reason to go looking for one you do not.

Putting the code box in its place

1. Search your shop's name with the word coupon.
2. Go through your checkout as a first-time buyer.
3. Replace the open box with a small link.
4. Put codes into email links so they apply themselves.
5. Show sale prices on product pages without a code.
6. Write a helpful message for expired codes.
7. Remove links that lead out of the checkout.

Step four does the most for the people you already email. A subscriber whose button leads to a cart with the discount already applied has nothing to type and no reason to search.

What a Canadian shopper needs to see near the price and in the cart, to know nothing will be added on delivery, is covered in telling Canadian shoppers there is no fee at the door.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.