Part 2. Raise the cart
8 Discounts, timers and social proof, without sabotaging yourself
How to pick a discount from your margin instead of your gut, why our countdown is real, and why the social proof only shows up sometimes.
These are the three levers everyone reaches for first. They work, within limits, and each has a way of quietly costing you money.
The discount
Start from your margin, not from a round number.
Work out what the item earns you at full price. Decide how much of that you are willing to trade for a sale you would not otherwise have made. That is your ceiling. Anything above it means you are paying for the privilege of shipping something.
Two things to remember. Below roughly ten percent, buyers barely register the offer as an offer. And the discount applies on top of a purchase you already have, so a thin margin on an extra item is still better than nothing, as long as it stays above your shipping and handling on that item.
Quantity tiers
Instead of one price, offer better terms as the quantity goes up: one at ten percent off, three at twenty, six at thirty. This is how you make an expensive candidate work, and it is the natural shape for consumables.
The tier must match exactly. A buyer who picks four gets the price you set for four, or the plain price if you set nothing for four. Fill in the quantities you actually want to sell.
The countdown
The offer can carry a timer. Ours expires for real: when it hits zero the offer is refused server side, not merely hidden. We built it that way on purpose, because a timer that resets when you reload is a lie your buyers eventually notice.
Timers are banned inside the checkout. Shopify's App Store rules forbid countdowns in checkout extensions, so you will not find the option in chapter 13. It is allowed on the one-click page after payment, where ours already runs.
Social proof
The app can show a line saying how many other buyers took this offer. It appears only once there is enough traffic and enough acceptances to mean something, and it uses your real figures.
If you never see it, that is the app declining to invent a number. That is the intended behaviour, and it is worth knowing so you do not go looking for a broken setting.
- Timer mid-countdown, not at zero
- The social proof sentence legible
- Phone width
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What you should have now
A discount you can defend from your margin, tiers on anything you sell by the unit, and a decision made about the timer. Now you need to know whether any of it is working, which is the next chapter.
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