Offers and coupons for your shop, and how to tell if they worked

Most shop discounts are unmeasurable. You put a sign in the window, that month is better or worse than the last one, and nobody can say which part of it was the sign.

A coupon with a code on it is the same discount with an answer attached. You know how many were handed out, how many came back, and what the discounts actually cost you.

Two different tools

Offers are announcements. 20% off all footwear until Sunday. They sit on your shop page, where somebody browsing local shops sees them alongside your catalogue.

Coupons are instruments. Each one is a code, each code can be checked, and each code can be spent exactly once.

Use an offer to tell people something. Use a coupon when you want to know whether telling them worked.

Cross-posting is a separate tap, on purpose

You can push an offer out of your shop page and into the wider ANOQR feed, where people who have never heard of your shop will see it.

That is a deliberate second tap rather than a checkbox in the composer, for two reasons. It spends a metered allowance — it is not unlimited — and it puts your shop in front of strangers. Neither of those should happen because a default was left switched on.

One thing to know before you use it: a cross-post is authored by your own profile, not by the shop's. It appears as you, recommending your shop, which is how it should read — a person standing behind a business is more persuasive than a business talking about itself. It also means your ANOQR profile is doing work every time you do it, so it is worth having a real photograph on it.

Printing the coupon cards

The coupon screen prints a sheet of QR cards straight from the browser. Ctrl-P, ordinary paper, cut them up.

There is no PDF generator and nothing to install, which is deliberate: a shopkeeper with a modest laptop and a shared printer gets a usable sheet out of the print dialog, and a tool that needed a download would simply not get used.

Hand them out at the counter, put them in bags, leave a stack by the till. Each card is a code, and each code is a row in your analytics later.

Scanning at the till

The till screen does scanning and redeeming as two separate taps, and it matters.

Scanning is read-only. Staff scan to check: is this real, has it been used already, what does it take off? A scanner that burned the coupon the instant it saw one would destroy a coupon every time somebody looked at it — including every time a customer asked "is this still valid?"

Redeeming is the second tap, and it is a decision somebody makes.

The camera is optional throughout. A phone that refuses camera permission, a torn QR, a customer reading the code out over the phone — the typed-in field does the same job. Staff reading a code off the paper in front of them is its own proof.

What the numbers tell you

Under the coupon list you get a redemption rate and what the discounts cost, both computed from codes actually scanned rather than from anything estimated.

Two figures, two different lessons:

• A low redemption rate means the offer did not land, or the cards did not reach anybody. The discount was not the problem.
• A high redemption rate with a disappointing month means the offer worked and the discount was too deep. You bought sales you were going to get anyway.

That second one is the expensive mistake, and it is invisible without codes. It is the whole reason to bother.

Where offers fit with everything else

An offer is worth more when there is something behind it. A shop with a catalogue gives a customer a reason to look past the discount; a shop that takes orders on WhatsApp gives them somewhere to go next.

If your shop is already listed by somebody else, claim it rather than duplicating it first — offers published on a duplicate listing are published to the page nobody visits.

And if your shutter is down by the time somebody arrives with a coupon, a QR decal on it lets them reach you without your mobile number being painted on the shutter for everyone else.