6 Alternatives to Discounting for eCommerce Brands

Discounting is a quick way to drive sales.

But that speed comes at a cost: lower revenue and slashed margins. 

Discounts are meant to create urgency and get customers to take action. But they’re far from the only option. There are plenty of alternatives to discounts that generate sales while also preserving precious profits. 

These are six of the best. 

1. Gift with Purchase (GWP)

The great thing about GWPs is that the perceived value is almost always going to be higher than your actual cost. 

So, rather than giving customers 20% off a $100 order, you can give them a gift that’s worth $20—but might only cost you $5. 

Newport, which sells fishing boats, apparel, and accessories, occasionally offers GWPs. At the time of writing, they’re offering a free hat with purchase of $100 or a free hoodie with a purchase of $1,000. The hat’s perceived value might be around $10. Their cost is probably $3. 

It’s a much smaller (read: better) impact on margin than offering 10% off. 

You can also include free samples as GWPs, like La Roche-Posay:

Samples are smaller GWPs, but they increase what’s in the box and may drive a repurchase if the customer likes the sample.

Quick GWP tips:

1. If you don’t have low cost items to add as GWPs, you can order products in bulk from Alibaba to use (so long as they’re relevant to your brand and of a decent quality). 
2. CPG brands might want to throw in one of their lower-priced product instead. If you’re selling eco-friendly cleaning products, you might add a simple reusable glass spray bottle as a GWP. 
3. A beauty brand can include an extra lip gloss with every purchase. That has a high perceived value and exposes customers to other products in the assortment. They might try it, like it, and come back to buy that lip gloss at full price later. 

2. Cash Back Rebate / Bounce Back 

Speaking of full price purchases… Cash back or bounce back credits can be really effective for driving repurchases. 

Rather than giving customers a discount, you can give them the equivalent in store credit. It costs you less up front, and customers come back to use their credit towards another purchase. 

Many brands offer a higher cash back amount than they would for an ordinary discount, because that subsequent purchase makes it worthwhile. 

At PostPilot, we frequently work with our friends at Fondue on cash back offers. (You can listen to our podcast interview with Fondue co-founder Oren Charnoff.) 

Their app lets brands incentivize customers with a credit that can be used towards future purchases or cash back. Because not everyone redeems their cash back, brands can roll it into future incentives. 

3. Exclusive Access or Product 

This approach is especially effective around holidays or special events like Black Friday. You want to capture customer attention and get people to your site, so give them something exciting.

Beauty brand Jones Road uses this to great effect. Instead of running discounts for BFCM, they introduced a product they knew a lot of customers wanted—and that was only available during that period. 

(Full price? At the holidays? @Apple?) 

The anticipated product got people browsing the site, which resulted in their buying other products at full margin. Without offering any discount at all, they still blew Black Friday out of the water. 

4. Bundle / Buy More and Save

Personally, we’re big fans of tiered incentives—offering higher incentives for more spending. Bundles are arguably the most tried-and-true merchandising move for higher margin, AOV, and even if your bundles have a low take rate, each purchase is a massive margin win.

PostPilot customer Bones Coffee’s special edition “Ultimate Nightmare Bundle” is 10% off, but it’s 5 bags of coffee at once. That high AOV purchase makes the bundle more than worth it for Bones. 

5. Bonuses 

Express shipping. Service upgrades. Gift wrapping. 

These are just a few of the ways to use bonuses to add value to an order. And in some cases, they won’t even cost you more. 

Auto accessories brand AutoAnything knew that when it got close to Black Friday, customers cared a lot about purchases arriving on time, and they were willing to pay more to ensure it would happen. 

The company offered free upgrades from ground shipping to two-day air—which in many cases, it was using anyway. Customers were happy to pay full price and still felt like they were getting something extra. 

6. Info Products 

There are up-front costs involved with info products—you might have to pay a writer, do some video editing, get a designer involved. But once you have your product, you can use it as an upsell indefinitely, with no additional costs. 

A Bar Above is a barware company that also offers online mixology classes. Because there’s no cost of goods for the courses, it can discount them aggressively or even offer them for free to encourage customers to buy the barware. 

Customers really like quality info products. There’s another plus: they can encourage people to use more of your non-info-products (you can just so happen to feature them in your info products).

Remember…

You don't necessarily want to give away the house in the pursuit of a quick sale. Especially to your highest value customers—you don’t want to waste dollars encouraging behavior that would probably happen anyway. 

It’s about offering the right incentive to the right person at the right time. Push different offers to different cohorts. The more likely someone is to defect, the bigger the incentive should be. 

These ideas for discount alternatives are starting points, but they’re just examples of what you can do. Think profits, not just revenue. Get creative, hyper-segment, think outside the box, and definitely think beyond a percentage off.