Why You Should Openly Share Your Shopify Discount Codes
How many times have you gone to checkout on an online store and seen this:
And how many times after seeing a discount box have you done this:
My guess is almost 100% of the time.
The problem with this discount code box is obvious. Customer's are seconds away from paying for your product and then, a quick glimpse of a potential saving and off they go searching for that elusive discount code.
Where they end up is anybody's guess, most likely one of the many coupon/discount code sites out there, and this isn't great for your business. You had a potential customer who was seconds away from becoming a paying customer and they are now clicking their way through a site that is bound to show discounts for your competition.
Even if you have no active discount codes, these discount sites store past codes. So what if your customers sees a 20% off code for your store that expired last month? Maybe they will then decide to wait to make their purchase as they would rather wait for your next discount code.
What is supposed to entice more purchases - offering discount incentives - has just become an obstacle to securing a paying customer.
How do you you fix this?
There are a few options.
1. The discount box will only show on Shopify if you have active discount codes created in your account. Therefore, simply remove any active codes and the box will automatically be removed. Thus lowering abandoned checkouts.
2. Openly share your discount codes. If you're going to offer discount codes then make sure your customers don't get the change to leave your site. There a couple of tactics we would use for this.
Display the code prominently on your site. Use a notice bar or pop up box*, or even include the code in your product description.
The second, which should probably do done anyway, regardless of whether you have active discount codes, is to create a permanent page for your discount codes.
Simply create a new page in your store, you don't have to link to it in your navigation, add your current discount codes and a brief message saying 'Any valid and active discount code can only be found on this page'. Title the page 'Your Store Name Discount Codes'. This will mean Google indexes the page in Google and if anybody searches your store name, followed by 'Discount' your page is likely to show number 1 in google. You could go one step further and include the month and/or year in the page title, making the page even more relevant to Google searches (remembering to update the date regularly). So if people do search for discount codes, your top ranking page will bring them right back to your site and provide them with the info they're looking for.
This is an often overlooked problem that has some simple solutions that can cost nothing to implement.
* View some of the Shopify apps that will allow you to do this immediately - https://apps.shopify.com/search/query?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=info+bar