To discount or not to discount

I always thought discounts cheapened my products, so I stayed away from them. Only on Black Fridays do I feel less ‘dirty’ about using discounts.

The ecommerce way of offering discounts on every arbitrary occasion they can think of always seemed disingenuous to me. Cheap hacks, I thought.

But maybe I’m not always right about it:

It works really well for like, iHerb, Amazon and your typical ecommerce stores. You can build thriving businesses off discounts, in fact. It works… for them.

Thing is, discounts are just like any other marketing or selling technique. It works in some cases. Cheapens in another. Just like how social media might work well for B2C, but not B2B.

I think moralising discounts is another one of those narratives I picked up from my early, impressionable days as indie hacker. Yeah if you’re a SaaS founder and offer a high value SaaS app with lots of complex functionality, you probably don’t want to go for cheap customers. You’d want to “charge more”. That fits the product’s modus operandi. Cheap customers tend to need more support, have more unreasonable demands, and basically just takes up more of your time for less ROI.

But what if your product is for price-sensitive customers? What if your product’s a commodity? Do you still take this so-called high road and charge more? Your business will tank. Because it’s a wrong business model for your target customers. iHerb customers just want a good deal.

So maybe I should try discounts more, in context where it makes business sense. Especially for Carrd plugins.

The customers are price sensitive. They love discounts, as observed over multiple Black Friday campaigns (my sales volume is highest in November, year on year). The rest of the year, they don’t buy as often and as much. The plugins are one-time purchase, and that works well with discounts. My business model is constant customer acquisition, so discounts fits well with that.

Maybe this is true for Lists Kit too, I don’t know… yet.

But no matter what, time to shrug off old tired narratives, and just do what works.