E-COMMERCE BEAUTY BRAND · CHECKOUT AND ATTRIBUTION
Finding the coupon leak at checkout
From a checkout that invited full-price buyers to go looking for a discount, to one that offered it only to people who already had a code.
Problem
Coupon-attributed revenue kept climbing, and redemptions far outran anything the actual distribution of codes could explain. The brand was giving away margin on sales that would have happened without a discount.
Strategy
My hypothesis was that the open promo code field at checkout was sending customers off to find a code for a purchase they'd already decided to make. A hunch is hard to prove from a single number, so I set out to test it against several independent sources before taking it to the client. The measures that would confirm it afterward were coupon-attributed revenue and total revenue read together, since a drop in the first with the second holding steady would show the discounts hadn't been producing the sales.
Execution
I compared code redemptions against how widely each code had been distributed, looked at the share of orders credited to coupon and deal sites in the affiliate program, traced sessions that left checkout and returned through a coupon site referral to buy with a code, and checked for codes turning up outside the audiences they were meant for. With all of the evidence pointing the same way, I made the case to the client. Their team collapsed the promo code field behind a text link, leaving it available to anyone holding a code while removing the empty box that had been prompting everyone else to go looking for one.
Results
Coupon-attributed revenue dropped and total revenue didn't.