So another amazing way to boost your sales is to offer discounts.
Now, I want to say straight away that the key to using discounts successfully is to use them wisely.
Because if you overuse them or use them incorrectly, you can risk damaging your brand or even worse,
losing money.
So how do we in fact use them wisely?
Well, you can see here that we already have a discount created.
And of course we set that up.
When I was showing you how to use the chatbot to recover abandoned carts and checkouts, and in fact,
in my opinion, and in my experience, the discount that you see here is the best type of discount.
And it's the one where we offer a percentage discount on the entire order.
Now, in a moment, we'll get into a bit more detail about what that actually means and how to set it
up.
But before we do that, I want to show you the four different types of discounts that you can set up
on your Shopify store.
And so to show you those, I just need to come over here and click on the create discount button where
you now see the four different discount types.
So first of all you have the amount of products.
So this is where you would simply choose to discount a specific product or perhaps a collection.
And it's a discount of this type that you would typically run if you were having some kind of sale on
your store.
The next discount type is what they call buy X, get Y, and we all see this a lot in our daily lives.
For example, the buy two get one for free offer, which we so often see in places like supermarkets.
Next up we have the amount of order.
Now again, this is the type of discount that we set up via video.
And in that example, we were giving them 15% off in order to get them to the checkout and actually
make the purchase.
But typically we would use this slightly differently, for example, in order to entice them to buy
as much as possible.
We might say if you spend over $100, we'll give you 10% off.
And then finally the free shipping discount type.
But of course, we already offer free shipping, so this one really is of no interest.
Now, I said at the beginning of the lecture that the key to using discounts successfully is to use
them wisely and with the amount of products discount type, it's a discount type, as I said, that
we would use, typically if we were running some kind of sale.
And sales are typically reserved for larger companies who have huge amounts of stock that they need
to get rid of.
But in our case, we're dropshipping.
We don't have any stock at all.
And therefore, in my opinion, we really don't need to be running sales.
And even if we did, and depending on how much we spent on advertising, we could run the risk of simply
breaking even or even worse, losing money.
And I definitely do not want you to be doing that.
And then for buy X, get Y.
It's also a similar story because again, this is often used to get rid of surplus stock or sometimes
to entice new customers into a store.
What we call a loss leader and a loss leader is effectively a customer acquisition technique, because
the company knows that they're not going to make any money on this sale.
They might even lose some, but they're looking at the lifetime value of the customer, hoping that
they're going to buy many products from them in the future.
Now, in my opinion, this system can work amazingly for large companies, but for small companies with
limited budgets like ours, I consider it to be a risky strategy and therefore one we don't really make
use of.
And so I hope you can see, therefore, why the amount of order is the most attractive discount type.
And so with that in mind let's actually click into this and set one up.
So first of all let me draw your attention to the method where you can see we can either apply a discount
code or an automatic discount.
Now with the discount code you can see here at the bottom it says customers must enter this code at
the checkout.
Meaning of course they need to have it in the first place.
So if we were to do this, typically what we would do is create the discount and then email it out to
our entire list saying something like, hey, fantastic news, if you spend over $100 in our store,
we'll give you 10% off.
Now, to be honest, we really don't use it like that because it feels like, at least in our opinion,
a little bit desperate and that may even damage our brand.
So instead we tend to use the automatic discount method.
So when I click on this you now see that it says customers will see this in their cart and at the checkout.
So what we can do here and we're actually going to do this is in the banner on our store where we already
have written free shipping on every order.
We're going to add to that 10% discount on all purchases over $100.
So in other words, everyone that visits our store is going to immediately see that.
And then if they do spend over $100, it's going to be automatically applied at the checkout.
And I'll show you how that works as well.
Okay.
So let's actually go ahead and set this up.
So first of all we need a title.
So I'm going to call this the $100 discount.
Then for the discount value of course we're offering 10% off.
So in here I'll put in a ten for the availability.
We can leave as is because this will be automatically applied to the online store sales channel.
And then scrolling on down, of course, for the minimum purchase requirement.
That's going to be $100, so I'll put in 100.
And then if we had other types of discounts, we could combine this discount with them.
But of course we don't.
So we'll leave this blank.
Which means the only thing we now need to do is to make this active.
And in order to do that, we simply set the date and the time.
And because I want this to be active immediately so that I can show you how it works, I'm going to
leave as is.
But of course, you could change this, and you could also set an end date in case, for example, you
just wanted to run this for a week.
So with all that done, if I scroll up to the top here in the top right hand corner, you see the summary.
And given that I'm very satisfied with everything that I've done, all I need to do is to click on save,
where you see that my $100 discount was created successfully.
And then if I come out of this, of course, you now see it added to the list of discounts.
So now let's see this in action.
But just before we do, let's modify the banner to include the phrase 10% off on all orders over $100.
So for that, of course we need to go to our theme editor.
So clicking on customize and then opening up the announcement bar, here is our existing message, which
I'll modify to include 10% off on all orders over $100.
So let's then save this and come out of the theme editor and then over to the store so that we can see
this in action.
And so first of all you will note the modified announcement bar.
And then what I'm going to do is to add in just one product and head to the checkout.
In other words, an order that's less than $100 just to ensure that no automated discount has been applied.
So going to our fabulous products, I'll click on leashes, then go to the jog with your dog and add
it to the cart where I'll then head straight to the checkout where.
Although you can see there's a space for a discount code to be applied, that's what we set up when
we were setting up the whole chatbot cart recovery process.
You will note that no automatic discount has been applied because of course our order is not over $100.
So now of course, what we want to do is to make this order over $100 so that we can see exactly how
it looks.
And to do that, I'm simply going to order a bunch more of these jog with dog leashes.
So I'll go to the cart and I'll add in a few more.
So now as you can see, I'm going to buy five and straight away down here, even before I get to the
checkout, you can see that it's mentioning my $100 discount offer, which of course is 10%.
Now, I must admit this is a little bit confusing because my estimated total is in euros and the 10%
off is in dollars, but trust me, this does all add up.
Okay, so let's go to the checkout where this time you see the subtotal and then the $100 discount,
giving me a final total which is a 10% reduction or a saving in this case of €14.48.
And so that's how we use discount codes to boost our sales.
Now, having shown you all that, you might have noticed that a couple of times during this lecture,
I've been saying things like, in my opinion, in our opinion.
And that's because what I've just shown you here is based on years of experience.
So we believe we know what works.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that I want you to exclusively use this kind of discount, and that
I would encourage you to at least explore the other discount types.
You're going to see that the setup is very similar, but however you end up using discount types, I
hope you can now see that discounts are an incredibly powerful way to boost your sales.