| What's interesting about the coupon code thing is if you look at Shopify's checkout page, they include it as an input field along with supporting URL based coupons. I can only guess they've done a massive amount of A / B testing since they have many thousands of stores and millions of transactions. There's a number of benefits to supporting both IMO: If someone is talking about your product on a podcast or audio form, being able to say "enter in promo code BENISCOOL at checkout to save 10%" is useful. But then in the show notes, they can link directly to the URL based coupon link. That is much cleaner than having to explain how the show notes link already has the coupon, and you must click that link specifically to get the applied discount. It also works in cases where show notes aren't available (ie. radio -- although that use case is very rare for a digital store). Another benefit of having it as a text input is during email promotion launches. For example, you might decide to put up your product for sale as part of an initial promo, but then in your email copy say something like "By the way, the next 15 people who use coupon code ABC123 will save an extra $10". You can't really do that with URL-only codes, unless you happened to include a second link in the email (technically could work I suppose, but it loses its appeal and becomes less clear on how it works). Lastly, another potential use case for input based coupon codes is doing some form of price parity based on geo location. You may want to show people from XYZ country a way to get a discount by entering in a code at checkout, but having it in non-URL form allows you to word it in such a way that it's optional. So if the person happens to live in XYZ country but they are well off enough not to need the discount, they might pay the normal price to show support. But like you said, the down side is people might hesitate to find a coupon. That's a very hard thing to measure. Checkout is super interesting to me because I'm currently developing a platform to sell digital items and the check out flow is what I'm currently developing. |