At first glance, the coupon looks like one of the simplest and greatest marketing tools a webshop has: you set up a 10 percent discount, send it out in a newsletter, feature it in a campaign, then watch how the orders come in. And it's exactly this simplicity that makes it frighteningly easy to use badly.
A well-built coupon campaign can help win a first purchase, bring back a previous customer, increase cart value or speed up the sale of slow-moving stock. With poor targeting, however, you end up discounting the very orders that would have arrived without a coupon anyway — so revenue may stay flat while your margin takes an ugly hit.
A good coupon strategy doesn't start with the question of whether to give 10 or 20 percent off, but with what customer decision you want the discount to change. Are you nudging someone towards a first order, aiming for a higher cart value, or trying to win back a lapsed customer? That difference decides whether the coupon works as a genuine marketing investment or simply leaves less profit on the same sale.
Growing revenue doesn't mean the campaign succeeded
One of the most common mistakes in coupon campaigns is that the merchant mainly watches revenue growth. If a weekend promotion lifts the webshop's revenue from HUF 2 million to HUF 2.5 million, that looks like a good result at first glance. But for the real picture you also need to see how much discount you gave, which products sold, how the average cart value changed, and ultimately how much profit remained after the orders — because the discount directly cuts into the product's margin. Suppose you sell a product for a net HUF 10,000 while its purchase cost is HUF 6,000. At full price, you keep HUF 4,000 of margin on it.
If you give a 10 percent coupon on the same product, the selling price drops to HUF 9,000 while the purchase cost stays unchanged. The margin is now only HUF 3,000, meaning you need to sell roughly 33 percent more units to make the same profit as without the discount.
With a 20 percent coupon, the selling price falls to HUF 8,000 and the margin to HUF 2,000. In that case, you already need twice the sales volume for the same result. And at a 30 percent discount, you'd have to sell four times as many units to keep your margin from shrinking. On top of that, this is still a simplified calculation. It doesn't include card payment fees, packaging, logistics, customer service, marketing or the cost of possible returns.
It can't be stressed enough: looking only at how many orders or how much extra revenue a coupon brought in is not enough. The more important question is how much additional profit was generated compared with the purchases that would have happened without the discount anyway.
When does a coupon actually work well?
A coupon works really well when it's tied to some condition or a specific customer behaviour. A 10 percent discount handed automatically to every visitor can hardly be called a coupon strategy — in that case you've effectively just cut your prices by 10 percent.
It's a completely different story when the discount applies only to the first order, can be used above a certain cart value, covers a specific product category, or is meant to prompt a previous customer to order again. Then you genuinely get something in return for the discount: a new customer, a higher cart value, faster stock turnover or a repeat purchase.
Sellvio's coupon system is flexible in this respect, since you don't have to extend every campaign to the whole webshop. A coupon can be assigned to specific products, product categories or manufacturers, can be percentage-based or a fixed amount, can have a validity period, and can be tied to a minimum cart value. The system also supports managing B2C and B2B price tiers.
The business significance is easy to see in a simple example. If a webshop with a HUF 14,900 average cart value gives every customer a 10 percent coupon, it also fulfils a large share of its existing orders more cheaply. But if the same discount can only be used above a HUF 20,000 or 25,000 cart value, it can encourage the customer to add more products to the cart. In that case the coupon is no longer a plain price cut but a deliberately applied cart-value booster.
A minimum cart value is one of the strongest margin-protection tools
Suppose your webshop's average cart value is HUF 18,000. If you give a 10 percent discount on every such order, you're giving up an average of HUF 1,800 in revenue even on purchases that would most likely have happened without a coupon.
The situation is entirely different if you tie the discount to, say, a HUF 25,000 minimum cart value. Then the customer sees they're only a few thousand forints short of using the coupon, making it easier for them to add one more product to the cart. The discount no longer simply reduces revenue — it encourages a higher order value.
Shopify's 2026 discount strategy guide recommends a similar principle: set the coupon threshold above your current average or median cart value. If it's set too low, you'll easily end up discounting orders that would have happened anyway.
The ideal threshold naturally varies from webshop to webshop. If the average cart value is HUF 12,500, for example, a HUF 30,000 threshold will probably feel too far away for the customer. A threshold of HUF 15,000–17,000, however, may be close enough to get a smaller add-on product into the cart.
Not every product can bear the same discount
One of the biggest risks of storewide coupons is that they ignore the varying margins across products. The same 15 percent discount can have completely different effects on an accessory with a 50 percent margin versus a fiercely price-competitive product sold at a 12 percent margin: the first can absorb it, while on the second it may even turn the sale into a loss. That's why it's worth reviewing your product portfolio not only by category and brand, but by margin as well. Sellvio gives you plenty of flexibility here, because a coupon's validity can be limited to specific products, manufacturers or categories.
In an electronics webshop, for example, it's not necessarily worth discounting the laptop itself if its margin is already thin. Often it's a better offer to discount a laptop bag, a mouse or another higher-margin accessory. The customer still perceives the value of the deal, while you're not giving away margin on your most sensitive product.
Sometimes a bundle offer beats a coupon
Not every promotion needs a coupon code. If the main goal is to increase cart value, a well-built bundle offer can often be the more effective solution.
In Sellvio you can create a dedicated bundle discount, defining which other product becomes available at a reduced price when certain products are added to the cart. If the customer meets the conditions, the system can automatically offer them the related product.
Commercially, this is often more advantageous than a generic "15% off everything" promotion. A discounted coffee pack next to a coffee machine, a memory card with a camera, or shoe care products with a pair of shoes can raise the cart value without you having to cut the price of the main product.
Quantity discounts work along similar logic. Sellvio supports percentage-based quantity discounts at product level, even with multiple discount tiers. If you want the customer to buy three or five units of a product instead of one, it's usually smarter to encourage that with a direct quantity discount than with a generic coupon.
Winning the first purchase requires different maths
There are situations where a lower margin on the first order is entirely justified from a business perspective: acquiring new customers. If a new customer is expected to order three or four more times over the next twelve months, the discount given on the first purchase shouldn't be measured solely against the result of that first transaction. Here, the customer's total expected value — the customer lifetime value — takes centre stage. A HUF 2,000 first-purchase discount can easily pay off if the customer acquired this way later generates HUF 20,000–30,000 in total margin — but for that, you also need to know whether these customers actually come back. If someone orders the cheapest product once purely because of the coupon and never buys again, you've in fact paid dearly for a one-off transaction.
That's why the success of first-purchase coupons shouldn't be judged purely on redemption rates. It's at least as important to track the later orders of the customers acquired this way, their average cart value, and how much margin they generate over the longer term.
Coupons can work especially well with returning customers
One of the best uses of discounts is encouraging the next order. A good example is an offer where, after their current order, the customer receives HUF 2,000 off their next purchase of at least HUF 20,000.
This carries several advantages at once. You're not cutting the margin of the current order — you're encouraging the customer to buy again, while the minimum cart value prevents the discount being used on a very small order. If the offer is also time-limited, that gives the customer an extra push not to come back months later.
EU price reduction rules also distinguish between general promotions advertised to everyone and genuinely personalised discounts. A unique voucher tied to a previous purchase and redeemable on the next order can therefore be treated differently from a publicly communicated "20% off for everyone today" campaign. This is an important distinction not just for marketing but for consumer protection purposes too, so coupons aimed at returning customers should be set up deliberately, with well-defined conditions.
Too-frequent couponing teaches customers never to pay full price
One of the less visible risks of discounts shows up not in the results of a given campaign, but over the longer term. If the 15 percent off arrives regularly on Fridays, a new promotion starts at the end of every month, and the Christmas discount follows right after Black Friday, returning customers eventually figure out the pattern.
At that point they rightly ask themselves: why buy at full price on Tuesday if they'll probably get the same thing cheaper in a few days? Too-frequent couponing therefore often doesn't create new demand — it simply shifts existing purchase intent into the promotional periods.
The Boston Consulting Group's analysis of promotional strategies also warns that too many and overly complex promotions can hurt campaign effectiveness, weaken the bond with the brand and ultimately cost revenue opportunities. A good webshop doesn't run promotions constantly; it gives a clear reason for the discount. That might be acquiring a new customer, getting a new product tried, increasing cart value, clearing stock, driving reorders or marking a change of season. If there's no clear business goal behind it, you may well not need a coupon at all.
Even the placement of the coupon field can affect conversion
Coupons have a less obvious effect too: the mere appearance of the coupon field can influence the purchase flow. If the customer is already at the cart, has decided to buy the product, and then spots a prominent "Coupon code" field, they can easily conclude there must be a discount available somewhere. A common reaction is to open a new browser tab, search for the webshop's name plus the word "coupon", and start browsing various coupon sites. That, however, breaks what had been an uninterrupted purchase flow.
The Baymard Institute's checkout research has also examined this phenomenon. A promo code field appeared on 70 percent of the e-commerce sites studied, and during testing several users left the checkout to go hunting for a coupon. Baymard therefore recommends that the coupon field shouldn't be too prominent, but should sit behind an expandable "Have a coupon code?" option.
The point is for the coupon to reward the customer taking part in the campaign — not to create a sense of missing out in someone who was ready to buy at full price.
Important safeguard: discounts shouldn't stack uncontrolled
One of the most dangerous promotional mistakes is when multiple discounts accidentally pile on top of each other. A newsletter coupon gets added to a product already on sale, then a VIP or bundle discount lands on top of that, and the order finally ships at a far lower price than the merchant originally planned.
In Sellvio's system, one coupon can be activated per order, coupons cannot be stacked, and they can't be applied to products that are already discounted. At first this may look like a simple technical restriction, but it's actually an important margin-protection mechanism. In a higher-volume webshop, a misconfigured 20 percent coupon that can be combined with other discounts can cause serious losses in a short time.
A coupon campaign needs an expiry date
A coupon that can be used indefinitely eventually becomes, in practice, an alternative price list. If a "DISCOUNT10" code tied to an influencer, a partner or a newsletter keeps working for months or even years, sooner or later it will most likely surface on coupon sites, forums, social media groups or in browser extension databases. From then on, the discount no longer necessarily rewards the originally targeted audience, but anyone who finds the code. And the webshop is essentially selling 10 percent cheaper without getting a new customer, a higher cart value or any other business benefit in return.
Sellvio coupons can be given both a start and an end date of validity, so it's worth tying every campaign to a specific period. A September newsletter coupon should expire in September, and a partner campaign's coupon should match the actual duration of the collaboration.
Organising your marketing this way not only helps you keep the discount under control but also makes evaluating the results easier, since you can see exactly which campaign performed how, and in which period.
Don't forget the 30-day rule either
A coupon campaign isn't just a marketing and finance question — the rules of price communication also need attention. In the EU, the key reference point for price reductions advertised to consumers is the lowest price in the 30 days before the promotion. In Hungary, the size of the promotional discount must also be measured against this price.
With coupons, however, there's a crucial difference between individual and widely available discounts. A personalised coupon sent to a single customer after a previous purchase, for example, can be treated differently from a publicly advertised "20% off everything this weekend with code WEEKEND20" campaign.
Based on the European Commission's guidance, coupon promotions like the latter — effectively available to anyone — may already fall under the price reduction rules, so before a larger campaign, don't treat price communication purely as a marketing question; it's wise to review it from a consumer protection angle too.
Which numbers should you look at after a coupon campaign?
The fact that, say, 428 coupons were redeemed in a campaign tells you little about its real result on its own. It's far more important to examine how the webshop's financial performance changed meanwhile. Compare the average cart value before and during the campaign, the margin per order, the conversion rate, and the ratio of new to returning customers. Another useful metric is how much revenue and margin each forint of discount handed out actually generated.
For a campaign built around acquiring new customers, it's also worth tracking later how many of the customers won this way order again. For stock clearance, the goal may be different: for a discontinued product, even a lower margin can be acceptable if it frees up the capital and space tied up in the warehouse.
Based on all this, we can say that a coupon's performance must always be measured against the original business goal. The same discount can be a loss-making decision in one situation and a perfectly rational tool for a different goal.
A well-built coupon always has a job to do
Before you create a new coupon in your webshop, try to state in a single sentence what you want to achieve with it: "With this discount, I want to…"
The goal might be winning a first order, lifting the average cart value from HUF 18,000 to at least HUF 25,000, luring back a customer who's been inactive for months, or selling off the stock of a discontinued product category faster. An equally valid goal is getting the customer to add a higher-margin accessory to the cart alongside the main product.
If you can't finish that sentence clearly, your coupon strategy probably isn't thought through enough yet. A discount works well when it doesn't exist for its own sake but serves a specific business goal.
In Sellvio you don't just hand out coupons — you can build a promotion system
In a modern webshop, discount management means far more than creating a coupon code. In Sellvio's system, alongside percentage and fixed-amount coupons, you can manage automatic promotions, product-, category- and manufacturer-level discounts, quantity discounts, bundle offers, loyalty points and user-specific discounts — all without a separate external app. This matters because different business goals call for different promotional tools. If selling higher volumes is the goal, a quantity discount may be the better fit, while for selling related products a well-designed bundle offer can work better. Targeted discounts can be given to specific customer groups, and for a classic coupon campaign you can set the discount's value, duration, minimum cart value and which products it applies to.
So Sellvio doesn't just let you create coupons — you can build a more sophisticated promotion system with it. The technology is there; the real question is which tool you use in service of which business goal.
The biggest discount isn't necessarily the best one
The customer is of course happy about a discount, but your job as a merchant isn't to give the biggest possible price cut — it's to find the smallest incentive that meaningfully changes the purchase decision. If 10 percent brings in just as many extra orders as 15 percent, there's no point giving up another five percentage points of margin. Likewise, a fixed HUF 2,000 discount above a HUF 25,000 cart value may boost the average order value more than a generic 10 percent coupon.
And it may also turn out that a given product needs no discount at all. If customers buy it at full price, a coupon only erodes your profit for nothing.
The goal of a good coupon strategy isn't the biggest possible discount, but getting some business value in return for every forint of discount you hand over: a new customer, a higher cart value, faster stock turnover, more frequent orders or a longer customer relationship.
If that's fulfilled, the coupon isn't the enemy of your margin — it becomes a sales tool you can consciously control.