You may have seen offers for online products that include a coupon code. When used at checkout, a discount gets immediately applied and the total sale amount is adjusted. You may also see an expiration date associated with this discount.
Vendors do this to motivate customers to buy sooner rather than later. And there are plenty of “tire kickers” that hesitate unless they have that motivation. This immediacy does work to the vendors’ advantage.
Expired Coupons Can Cost in Time and Effort
But it can create a headache for online coupon aggregators or websites. Each time the coupon expires, they will have to remove that coupon and search for others, or contact you and any other vendors with expired coupons, to ask for updated coupons. There are coupon management solutions that were created to manage this on behalf of the vendors and the coupon code aggregators. But for small time owners, this can be an expensive solution.
As a vendor, you will need to determine if having perpetual coupon codes makes sense. You want to try to appease the aggregators, because they can bring you some decent buying traffic. Of course, you could decide to manage your coupon program entirely on your own. But those same problems become yours to deal with rather than the aggregators. If they are bringing you a steady income, you can understand why you don’t want them to have to make constant changes.
Non-Expiring Coupons for Top Sellers
If you find aggregators that are successful with your products and they are making you a lot of money, you could offer to pay for a coupon management solution on their behalf. The caveat would be that they must maintain a certain sales volume. Another option is to create a custom perpetual coupon (doesn’t expire) for your top sellers only. This practice goes on quite frequently in the e-commerce world. Keeping the coupon code aggregator happy is going to pay off in the long run. The traffic and sales that they can potentially bring to your website is too great to ignore.
Multi-Tier Coupons
Another common practice is to set up tiered coupon code percentages. You can choose whether you want to allow the coupon website owner to set the amount (up to a limit) or you come up with the tiers yourself. The advantage to doing this, is the website owner can offer special extended deals to their best customers. They can offer new customers the lower end discounts to entice them onto their lists, and as they progress in the sales funnel and continue to purchase more, they can bump up the discount rate tier to those customers.
