The Discount That Trained Your Customers to Wait

A pattern, not a promotion

The first year, a sale in late November brings a surge of orders and looks like a success.

The third year, regular customers know it is coming, and some of them stop buying in early November.

By the fifth year the sale is not producing extra demand, it is collecting demand that would have arrived anyway, at a lower price.

The sale still looks good in isolation, because the sale week is busy, which is why this runs for years without being noticed.

How to see it in your own figures

The check that settles it, and it takes twenty minutes.

Plot weekly sales for the two months around your usual sale date, for the last three years.

Look at the weeks immediately before the sale rather than at the sale itself.

A dip that deepens year on year is the signal, and it is the shape this produces: quiet, then a spike, then quiet again.

Compare the whole eight weeks across years rather than the sale week, since the sale week always looks better and the period is what matters.

Where the eight-week total is flat while the sale grows, the promotion is redistributing rather than adding.

What it costs

• Margin on sales you would have made anyway.
• Quiet weeks before it, at full staffing.
• A concentrated peak that is harder to fulfil.
• Full-price sales becoming the exception.
• A reference price customers now expect.

The last is the durable damage. Once a customer has bought at a discount twice, that becomes the price in their mind and the ordinary price reads as inflated.

Why it is hard to stop

Worth acknowledging, since the advice to simply stop is not usable.

Customers expect it, and a year without one produces complaints and a genuine dip while people wait for a sale that does not come.

Competitors run theirs at the same time, so not participating in a period when everybody is discounting is a real cost.

And the sale week is the best week of the year in the figures, which makes it psychologically difficult to touch.

So the practical approach is to change its shape gradually rather than to cancel it.

Change the shape, not the existence

Several ways, and they can be combined.

Move the date, so it stops being predictable, and vary it year to year.

Narrow it to specific lines rather than everything, particularly the ones you want to clear anyway.

Shorten it, since a long sale gives everybody time to wait and a short one rewards being on the list.

Change the form: free delivery, a bundle, an added item, or early access rather than a percentage off, none of which resets the reference price.

And make it conditional, such as spend over an amount, which lifts order value rather than lowering margin on small orders.

A worked example

A shop had run a twenty per cent sale in the last week of November for four years.

Plotting eight weeks around it showed November sales falling year on year while the sale week grew, with the eight-week total roughly flat.

They kept a promotion but changed it: free delivery rather than a percentage, on orders over a threshold, for four days rather than ten, on a date they moved a fortnight earlier.

The sale week was smaller than the previous year and the eight-week total was up.

Margin across the period improved noticeably, since the delivery cost was less than twenty per cent of order value.

A handful of customers asked where the usual sale was, which was the whole cost of the change.

Give the loyal customers something else

Since the people most affected by removing a predictable sale are the ones who buy most.

Early access to new stock, at full price, is valued by regular customers and costs nothing.

A small unadvertised extra in the parcel does more for repeat buying than a discount and never becomes an expectation about price.

An occasional offer to a mailing list, unpredictable and modest, keeps the list worth being on without training anybody to wait.

The aim is to reward the relationship rather than the timing, which is the thing an annual sale gets backwards.

Decide what the promotion is for

Before running any of it, since most run without a stated purpose.

Clearing specific stock is a real reason, and the promotion should then be restricted to that stock.

Attracting new customers is a real reason, and the offer should then be limited to first orders.

Hitting a monthly figure is a reason, and it is worth knowing that it borrows from next month.

Because everybody else is doing it is the reason most sales actually run, and it is the one that produces the pattern described here.

Watch what it does to the rest of the year

A wider effect than the eight weeks around the sale.

Customers who have learned that a sale exists at all start waiting generally, not just in November, which shows up as hesitation on full-price orders throughout the year.

The visible symptom is a rise in abandoned baskets containing items the customer returns to look at repeatedly without buying.

It also shows in messages asking whether a sale is coming, which is the customer telling you plainly what the promotion taught them.

Count those messages, since a rising number of them is the clearest evidence available that the pattern has spread beyond the sale period.

The counter-case

Predictable sales are not always wrong.

Where the aim is genuinely to clear seasonal stock on a known cycle, predictability is a feature and customers turning up for it is the point.

In some categories the discounting period is so established that absence is more costly than participation.

And a business that needs cash in a specific month may reasonably borrow from the next one with its eyes open.

Check the eight weeks around your sale across three years, and if the total is flat, change the shape rather than the existence.

What to do

1. Plot eight weeks around the sale, three years.
2. Look at the weeks before, not the sale.
3. Compare the period total, not the peak.
4. Move the date and vary it.
5. Change the form away from a percentage.
6. Restrict it to stock or to new customers.
7. Give regulars access rather than discount.

Step three is the one that reveals the problem, since the sale week always looks like a success and the surrounding weeks are where the cost sits.

What a discount teaches more generally is covered in discount codes and what they teach customers.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.