Cyber Monday 2011 at Detailed Image

That picture says it all. I couldn’t stand back far enough to get all of the boxes in the shot!

I’m writing this at 4:45 PM on Monday, so I’m not sure whether or not today will break our record for sales in a day. I think it will based on our pace, but if it doesn’t, it will be close*. Regardless, we’ve already surpassed last November in sales, and the year as a whole surpassed 2010 a while back so in some ways it’s kind of insignificant.

To me, the real significant thing about today was just how easy it felt. It wasn’t hectic like it was in previous years (see posts from Cyber Monday 2008, 2009, and 2010) but orders were coming in at just as fast of a pace, if not faster. Compared to say 2009 it felt half as busy even though we shipped out more orders.

Throughout the year we put all of these little efficiencies in place to save a minute here and a minute there. We also have worked hard to put together a team of people who work hard but also have a relaxed, positive attitude. All of those things really come together on a day like this. With a really small team – only five of us in the warehouse today – we were able to pack and ship a mountain of orders without rushing or scrambling around.

The number of emails that we received relative to the number of sales has been down as well (yes, we track that number), which again I attribute to all of the little improvements we’ve made throughout the year to our product pages, FAQs, guides, and blogs. It’s a day to celebrate the cumulative impact of all of those little wins.

Oh, and we *almost* filled up the entire FedEx truck. They had to pack the boxes in there pretty tight. I’m looking forward to the day when they have to call in for reinforcements!

*Update 11/29 – The pace picked up considerably in the evening and we ended up destroying our single-day sales record!

The last time we ran this sale I was on vacation and the first day crashed the site. It was kind of a nightmare. That was in mid-2009 just after launching our new shopping cart software. We’ve come a long way since then. While I doubt that the site will crash (and if it does we’re doing some ridiculous volume), I am interested to see the distribution of sales throughout the 3 days. Last time the first day was HUGE – one of our top 5 busiest days ever – and the other two days, despite still being very big sales, were not much better than the average day. The psychology behind a time sensitive, decreasing-in-value sale is fascinating. It’s one of Mike’s favorite things to experiment with.

As I wrote about a few years ago, we start our holiday planning as summer is winding down. While last year was a success, when we entered our planning stage this year we noticed some opportunities that we missed last year. We’re putting every resource we have in to maximizing sales and new customer acquisition during this two-month stretch. It’s such a different phenomenon than the rest of the year. People spend more than they normally do (hence enticing sales work magnitudes better than they do normally), and when it comes to gifts our competition expands to every retailer and not just other auto detailing retailers. If someone is looking for a gift for dad, we’re all of a sudden competing with Home Depot and Best Buy and every other retailer out there, something we’re going to attempt to take advantage of this year.

Mike also did some really smart promotions in October to help increase conversions during the holiday shopping period. For instance, we ran a review contest that resulted in three times more reviews in October than we get in our average month. More quality product reviews on more products = higher conversion rates. And as you can see, we have A LOT of product reviews on our site.

Analyzing data, coming up with new opportunities, planning what we’re going to be doing differently, and the like is all fun, but what really matters is the execution. That starts today.

*We are also interviewing candidates for our open customer service position this week. To make the holidays even crazier, we’re hoping to have this person hired by the end of the year.

**As I went to publish this post I noticed that it’s my 500th since switching the blog over to WordPress. I wonder if I’ll hit 1k? I’ve slowed down a bit with my posting so it probably would take a LONG time.

Last week we had a chargeback come through for the first time in a long time (the customer has since rescinded it – they claim their credit card company initiated a chargeback for the wrong purchase). Which got me to thinking – what happened?

We did three distinct things that I think directly resulted in our near-elimination of chargebacks:

1. We stopped shipping internationally. A large number of chargebacks came from international customers. When we’d investigate the order there was no AVS (address verification) like there is with suspect US orders. Essentially shipping an international order was always a crap shoot.
2. We switched the name on our credit card statement from “Pure Adapt Inc” to “Detailed Image”. We originally used “Pure Adapt Inc” when we had Tastefully Driven and were planning on having multiple Pure Adapt e-commerce sites. Upon shutting down TD, this change led to a reduction of accidental chargebacks. Customers wouldn’t recognize “Pure Adapt Inc” and would immediately call and initiate a chargeback. Many of these we were able to get the customer to rescind, but it was a lot of work.
3. We started canceling suspect orders. We still get international orders. They just use a freight forwarding service. Any order that looks shady we play it safe and cancel. Many of our manufacturers have asked us not to ship their products in volume overseas because there are underground re-bottling businesses. As a courtesy to them, and to reduce our headaches, we’ve abided by this and it has worked out great for all involved.

The other potential factor, the one that’s out of our control, is that credit card companies may have tightened up. I had a random $250 charge from my cable company last year. After calling them they couldn’t figure it out. The rep told me to initiate a chargeback. The process wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it was. I’m sure each card is different, but at least Bank of America made me jump through some hoops to get it initiated. Maybe the credit card companies realized that people were taking advantage of this feature and made it a little more difficult to take advantage of. I’m not necessarily sure that this is a factor, but it might be.

Regardless of the exact factors, it’s nice to have one less thing to worry about. All of the other “solutions” – working with a whitelist system, requiring all AVS matches, getting our lawyer involved – would all create a bunch of headaches and take away time that could be better spent growing our business.

This isn’t all that intuitive of a practice. I mean, you could argue that it’s not worth the effort of even posting it until you have it in stock, have it photoed, and have a description written. Make it a one shot deal. No one will buy it without a photo or description anyway…right? This is what we did in the past, and often times weeks would go by from the time we got the product in stock to when it was on the site.

After the success of the big Meguiar’s pre-sale back in February, we realized just how big of a deal this could be. Many of those Meguiar’s products were sold out before we got them in stock. Meaning we had collected the money from our customers before we were even billed for the products! All of a sudden we’ve turned a huge cash flow disadvantage into a huge cash flow advantage. We can take that revenue to pay off the bill and order more. As opposed to starting off in the red, we’re starting off using our profits to fund growth. By the time that first bill was due, we had already sold out of the second batch of products and had a third (or maybe even a fourth) batch on order.

Of course, that was a major product launch that had a ton of hype in the detailing world. We were the first in the industry to get the products up for pre-sale. We ran a pretty big marketing campaign along with it. We could have just been capitalizing on being first to market and this could have been a non-replicable one-time fluke.

We decided to commit to continuing the practice (and by “we” I basically mean everyone else in the company – my role in getting a new product for sale is pretty minimal, sometimes I’m not involved at all). Somewhat surprisingly it continued to work well across all brands and all types of products. To varying degrees of course, but it always worked. Almost nothing we’ve put up for pre-order hasn’t sold. The craziest pre-sales were some of the brushes we recently picked up. We named them ourselves so they have no prior brand affiliation, and yet people still bought them without a picture or description! When you compound all of this across a bunch of different brands, it has allowed us to expand products faster and with more confidence.

Now, if you’re sitting at home thinking “cool, I’m just going to start an e-commerce business and do this” there are a few caveats worth mentioning…even if they should be obvious. First and foremost, this only works once you have an established customer base that trusts your product recommendations, something you can only achieve with years of good will and honesty, right down from your product descriptions to the information on your site and your customer service. You also need to have a good buyer. Greg has been essentially perfect this year. Everything he’s decided to pick up has been a hit. That only comes with years of experience and a skillset that combines some mixture of good data analysis and good industry foresight.

This experience has been one big lesson in “you’ll never know if you don’t try”. We all hold assumptions about our businesses and our customers. Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong. As was the case with the Weekly Special last year, this is one of those times where I’m really glad to be wrong.

Upon finishing a programming project to improve how we manage out of stock products and then integrate it with our shipping estimates (see image above), I completed all of the major initiatives that we wanted to complete in 2011 to improve our shopping cart software that powers Detailed Image. The reason why we’re at this point and it’s only June 5th is a pretty simple one – most of the important stuff is finally finally done! We’ve built a stable, scalable, easy-to-manage and easy-to-use platform that will serve us well for years to come. There’s nothing “major” left to do…at least as of right now. We’re entering a maturity stage for the software, one that I’ve never really experienced, where we can focus on some combination of data-driven small tweaks (lots of split-testing) and some crazy experimental stuff (like completely new interfaces for shopping).

Out of curiosity, I went searching for the first evidence of the start of this shopping cart project. I vividly remember the night when we decided to abandon the osCommerce platform that Detailed Image had been using in 2006/2007 and begin developing our own. Had there been something like Shopify around at the time, there’s no way we would have ever attempted a project of this magnitude. But the shopping cart software in 2007 left a lot to be desired, especially when it came to search-engine-friendliness.

Anyway, I was able to dig up a document called “Time Frame” from July of 2007 where I outlined to my partners the development time frame for the software, in which I estimated that we’d complete and launch the site sometime in late August. The earliest blog post that I can find, Flipping the Switch from 8/11/2007, about dialing up my productivity to hit the launch date, mentions that we were shooting for a September 1, 2007 launch. We eventually ended up launching on 9/7/2007 – the title of my post, DI Up – Completely and Utterly Drained, kind of says it all about how hard we pushed to launch. There was a quick growth spurt right away, and after another solid year of growth we realized that we had outgrown that current setup and the entire thing needed a revamp if we were going to stay on our platform during our next big growth phase. Starting in early 2009, Mike and I built a new shopping cart system, one that fixed most of the problems of the old one while also being compatible with many of the things the old one did right. That launched in May of 2009, and my launch post is pretty similar to that one from 2007 in that I was totally mentally spent. Ever since then we’ve been meticulously chipping away one feature at a time up to the present.

If you showed me back in 2007 what we have now, my jaw would have dropped. Both on the front end and on the back end, we have software that I believe gives us a big competitive advantage. If you look at all of the stuff we’ve tried as a company over the years, we’ve started a lot of things, but for one reason of another have changed directions and never seen them all the way through (all of which I believe in retrospect were good decisions). This is something that we’ve been committed to for four years now, and I think the results of this slow, iterative improvement speak for themselves when you evaluate the product as a whole and the impact it’s had on our growth.

There’s an amazing sense of accomplishment that comes along with sticking with a project like this for so long. It’s very tangible evidence of my progress as a developer and our progress as a company. There’s also a great sense of relief that comes with being at this point. Any time I haven’t been working on the cart, there’s been this guilt in the back of my mind that I need to get back to it because we’re still lacking this important feature or that important feature. There was a time back when I left my job where I spent considerably more time doing SEO and web marketing for us and for our clients than I did doing any sort of development. Looking forward, I’m excited to have the chance to push forward with the development on LockerPulse, re-introduce some of that marketing into my day (for both sites), and tackle new business challenges like hiring our next wave of employees.

One of the more difficult things has always been figuring out at what threshold we need extra people in the warehouse beyond the scheduled team. What we’re really trying to quantify is: how much physical work needs to be done to get all of the orders out? For years we always relied on the total dollar amount of orders in our shipping queue. This is a good metric, but it has some noticeable flaws, especially on busy days. For instance, if we’re running a 20% off sale, that number will appear to be lower than the actual amount of work that needs to be done (an order that usually costs $100 will only be factored in at $80). Or, if we have a buffer on sale (as we do this month) and we’re selling a lot of them, it could make it appear as if there’s more work than there actually is because there’s a big difference in how long it takes to package a single $130 item than $130 in $10 – $20 products.

Given this, we asked ourselves, what numbers do we have that will help normalize this data a bit and give us a simple number that we can work off of on a daily basis? We decided that we could get a much better idea of how busy we were if we factored in total dollar amount being shipped, total number of packages being shipped, total number of items being shipped, and total weight being shipped. We then came up with a maximum threshold for each, the absolute most we think we can do in one business day given our current team, which we guessed to be roughly 20% higher than our previous maximums. These maximums will likely change any time we add staff or introduce a new efficiency.

We weighted each of these factors equally to come up with a simple single percentage that gives us a better approximation of how busy we are. We can view it in “real-time” for what is currently in our shipping queue, and also have a report so that we can compare it to the past. Our maximum is roughly five times larger than our average day, meaning that on average we’re around 20% capacity but that we’ve fluctuated up to about 80% on our busiest day. I’m not sure if this is normal for e-commerce companies or not. I certainly think the seasonal nature of our business, combined with how often we run sales, factors in to the variation quite a bit.

Here’s a shot of the variation from before, during, and after a recent sale (read from bottom up, so the 15% day is the first day in the example):

I’m really excited about this. It’s a very simple metric, which is why I think it works. It’s hard to try to think in terms of packages and revenue relative to our staffing capabilities, but it’s easy to think in terms of percentages. In both the short term and long term this should help us out quite a bit with our warehouse staffing decisions.

All of that is even more impressive when you consider that in January we closed Tastefully Driven, stopped selling on Amazon, and stopped shipping internationally. Amazon in particular was a large portion of last year’s Holiday sales. This time around it was all domestic Detailed Image orders.

We were prepared for the spike in volume. We all went into the warehouse on Friday, Sunday, Monday, and today (Tuesday) to help pack orders. Unlike UPS, FedEx ships on Friday so we were able to get the first wave of orders out the door on Friday. A little after noon on Cyber Monday I was able to snap a few pictures of the orders for the weekend and Monday up until that point:

Most definitely our largest pile ever, although today was pretty close. Take a quick peek back at the photos in those posts from 2008 and 2009. It’s amazing to see how many more boxes we shipped out this year.

A lot of preparation goes into this six day stretch. It all starts in August when Mike begins to gather data about what we did last year, what trends are going on in retail, and puts together a tentative plan for us to use as a starting point. We meet in late August or early September and begin to do everything that’s necessary. We need to plan inventory and finances accordingly, which can be tricky because this time of the year is sandwiched by our four slowest months (September, October, January, and February).

On my end, the majority of my contribution comes in September and October when I’m programming in any new features that we’ll need. A few examples from this year were the mobile site, the free shipping upsell system, and a feature in our back-end that allows us to quickly edit an order to save precious customer service time (think of an AJAX invoice that lets you add products, remove products, change quantities, change prices, change shipping methods, change addresses, and more).

The actual days themselves were pretty anti-climactic for me this year. Mike has a ton of work executing the sales (newsletters, site banners, etc), Greg has a ton of work with customer service and inventory management, and George has extra customer service and accounting to do. For me though, this is the time where I see the fruits of my work, rather than scramble around like in years past. The site is really stable – I think I only received one technical question from a customer. Our processes are really refined and efficient. So, given my relative lack of pressing work, I did my best to help Charlie out in the warehouse in any way that I could. To be honest though, things went pretty smooth considering that we probably ripped through almost 40% of our inventory.

Contrast that with my posts from previous years where I was mentally and physically drained from the utter chaos. It’s a pretty awesome feeling to see everyone and everything come together like this. It gives me confidence that we can scale by several magnitudes without having to overhaul anything major. Which, on the DI side of things, frees us up to really focus on growth, and that really excites me.

That said, we still use free shipping as a promotional offer from time to time, and in particular during the Holiday season we do exactly what I just said we don’t normally do – offer free shipping to customers who spend over $150 in hopes of upselling all customers over the $150 during a season where people spend more freely. For us, the Holiday season starts on 11/1, and like last year we have the free shipping banner across the top of every page:

This year we also programmed in a new feature. On the Cart page – the page where you can delete items, change quantities, and get a shipping quote, just before you proceed to the Checkout page that requires a log in – users are now shown just how much more they need to spend to qualify for the free shipping. As they add/remove products on the page, the shipping estimate updates accordingly using AJAX:

I’ll plan on following up with a post on the results after the Holidays. To gauge success, I’ll look at average order value to see if that increased, and I’ll also look to see what percentage of our orders crossed the free shipping barrier.

The interesting thing about this is that this same system could be applied to other promotions that we run. Say, for example, when we give away free products. You could say “Spend $x more and get two free towels”. Really any promo that requires a min-spend could be potentially enhanced with the system. Will be interesting to see how well it works.

Yesterday we launched a dedicated mobile site for Detailed Image. Above are a few screenshots. Overall I’m extremely pleased with how it came out. The functionality is nearly 100% of the full site. That said, the story of how this mobile site came about over the past two weeks is much more interesting than the functionality of the site so that’s going to be the focus of this post.

Why a Mobile Site?

I think the main answer to this is obvious – more and more people are browsing the web from mobile devices. The second reason, and what threw me off course on the scope of this project, was to simplify functionality. The Detailed Image site when it was launched in early 2009 was one of the few e-commerce sites that really pushed the use of AJAX. Some features, such as a dropdown notification after adding a product to cart (instead of being taken off page), or adding/removing products from your cart, or applying a coupon code, greatly benefit from a usability perspective. Initially, that level of javascript processing wasn’t possible on mobile phones. In 2009 the majority of the people trying to buy from an iPhone ran into issues and couldn’t complete their purchase. If you recall, it was one of the four major reasons that people failed our checkout.

My Original Strategy

Given that reasoning, our original strategy was to build a completely separate mobile site at m.DetailedImage.com similar to how we built our scaled back mobile site for LockerPulse. The mobile site would have stripped down functionality, removing the need for javascript in the shopping process to accommodate phone browsers. Just to get all of the portions of the site critical to shopping (home page, browsing, item pages, registration, checkout, etc) I figured it would take 1-2 months plus testing time. While the back-end functionality would remain the same and utilize all of the existing classes, the front-end would be totally new.

Initially I had this in my dev plan for early 2011, prior to our Spring rush. Then I looked at the stats and saw that about 6% of our visitors were coming from mobile devices. I decided to try to bust ass and get it done prior to the Holidays – even an increase in conversion rate of a percentage or two amongst those mobile users would make it worth my time. However, as I sat down to map the project out I started to freak out a bit (this was only last Monday, some 11 days ago). There was no way that I could get it done prior to the holidays and still get everything else done that I had planned. In addition, I wasn’t really looking forward to all of the tedious testing. What to do?

When I mentioned my plan to work on the mobile site, George pointed out that many people were in fact checking out OK on their devices. That prompted me to look into the data a bit more. Turns out that all throughout 2010 people have been checking out fine using their mobile devices. Only 1 failed checkout, in February, and I’m pretty sure it was one of the other reasons that caused it. All in all, lots of sales through mobile devices, almost all on iOS and Android. It does make sense – given the advance in the Webkit browsers that both use, any javascript issues from early 2009 that I assumed were still there are now gone. Just for good measure I picked up my Android phone and tested everything I could think of – no issues.

That completely changed my approach. Now we’re not talking about functionality at all. We’re talking strictly aesthetics, which led me to the idea…

My New Strategy

What if we simply just served a new stylesheet to mobile users? It would be inserted into the header after all of the other stylesheets so that it would over-ride the main styles and display them properly for mobile devices. I remembered MOBIFY, a company that will “mobify” your site in minutes with the same approach.

I whipped open Firefox, opened up Firebug, and within minutes had proved my concept to myself. From the LockerPulse site, I remembered all of the “rules” for mobile design – full width, no sidebars, variable font sizes, small images, etc. It was pretty easy to show myself that it was possible. I was so excited – the benefits of doing it this way are astronomical (see below).

Instead of spending months, I spent a handful of days going page by page through Detailed Image and re-styling the pages, although once the template was done many of the pages already looked just fine. Only ~150 styles were required to transform the entire site. We benefited immensely from haven written all W3C compliant HTML and structuring our CSS well. I had to write one small javascript function, do tiny bit of work with the HTML served (such as changing the doctype to a mobile doctype), and build in the device detection from LockerPulse, and we were all set.

How it Works

When someone is determined to be a mobile user, we simply change the doctype declaration and add in the new stylesheet and javascript function. Everything – including both blogs, the guides, reviews, and the entire shopping process – still has the functionality that it does on the main site. How do we determine if someone is a mobile user? There are a few ways:

• URL variable – the URL variable “mobile” can be toggled on any page of the site to put you in or take you out of “mobile site mode” (i.e. www.detailedimage.com?mobile=on). m.DetailedImage.com simply directs there. There are links in the footer of both versions to go back and forth (no visitor ever actually has to use the URL variable).
• Cookie – once the URL variable is set one way or another, the rest of your session will remain that way unless you change your mind and click one of the links in the footer.
• Device detection – if there isn’t a URL variable or a cookie, we use a class I built for LockerPulse to detect whether or not you’re using a mobile device. Given that it’s been proven on LP, this was a very quick implementation.

Pros/Cons

First, the pros:

• Way faster – took less than two weeks from idea to implementation!
• Little/no maintenance, very scalable – assuming we stick to our coding/styling standards, new pages should look just fine without any work. Occasionally we’ll need to do something minor like hide an element, shrink an image, or remove a border.
• Cool features that help mobile browsing – I never would have thought to include the autosuggest for the search box in a mobile version, but it’s maybe even more important because of how tedious it is to type on a mobile screen. In the same manner, drilling through products by criteria such as brand, price, and usage become even more helpful on a small screen.
• The entire site – the blogs and the guides are a large portion of our traffic. It’s great to get those into a readable format for someone who has a few seconds to kill on their phone.
• No redirects – no redirects to maintain, and if the device detection happens to be wrong there’s no messy incorrect redirects going on.

Of course, there are a few cons:

• Extra HTML – a dedicated site would have only the HTML necessary for the mobile site. Our mobile pages serve up some elements, only to have them hidden with CSS.
• A lot of requests – in the same manner, we have our main stylesheet, only to have an additional request being made to another stylesheet that over-writes a large portion of the original stylesheet.

Clearly, the cons are NBD (no big deal) given the relative advantages of the pros.

SEO Impact

But how does this affect how search engines see the site? Good question. Thankfully Google answers it in full in their recently updated SEO guide (I know I’ve said it before in my essay, but it’s a must-read for any site owner – who better to get your advice from than the search engine itself?).

Google does two things that are really smart – they have separate sitemap syntax for mobile sites, and they use a separate user agent when crawling mobile sites. The first lets you submit your mobile sitemap to them. In our case, the URLs I submitted were exactly the same as the ones in our regular sitemap. The difference being that they’ll send Googlebot-Mobile instead of Googlebot to visit those mobile URLs. By adding Googlebot-Mobile to your device detection, you’re serving your mobile pages to the mobile crawler and your normal pages to the normal crawler. It’s explained in full in their guide, but basically they just want you to show them what you show a visitor of the same criteria (mobile vs non mobile) and you’ll be fine.

Business Impact

Bottom line: I just got a two month project done in two weeks, and got it done better. For me, this serves as a reminder to always challenge my own assumptions. Things change fast in the web world. What wouldn’t have worked in September 2009 worked just fine in September 2010.

All of this works without us losing money because we really have only two ways that you can get a discount:

• You buy a product is on sale for everyone. These can be seen on our sale page at any time, and include our daily and monthly specials.  These products are discounted using formulas that take into account our COGS so that we never lose money on a sale product.
• You use a coupon code, which involves infinite possible combinations of product discounts, free products, and shipping discounts.

There are a few other factors like gift certificates and account credit, but for the most part that’s it.

Given that we don’t ever lose money on a sale product, the key to our entire sales philosophy lies within our coupon code system.  We’re able to run an unlimited number of sales concurrently without fear of losing money because we only allow one coupon code per order.

Each code is designed to give one advantage without another. For instance, a free shipping code with a min spend of $50 might not give any other discount so we make full profit on every product in the order.  Or if we give a free $20 product away when you spend $70, we realize that you’ll be paying full price for shipping, full price for your other products, and that our cost on that $20 product is far less than $20.  For the weekly special. the formula is completely automated to do exactly what I just described.

With all of that said, no matter how often we mention “one coupon code per order”, we get countless comments/questions from people who are “unable to use a coupon code” and it turns out they are just trying to use two codes.

We originally did a poor job communicating this. Our initial plan was to just try stating it more clearly with our promotions.  We also added some text saying “Limit one per order” to the confirmation message that you see when you enter a code:

Unfortunately, neither of those really did anything.  It’s not that we necessarily blame people for trying – some places do allow multiple coupon codes – but we want to be as clear as possible up front, plus there’s also no point in us fielding questions about it.  We had to come up with a better way without over-complicating the checkout process or turning people off.

Last night we unveiled a new checkout system.  Most of the improvements were behind the scenes, but one thing that is new on the checkout page itself is what you see when you enter a coupon code:

You now have to click to change your coupon code. We hope that the simple act of having to read and click that link will reduce the questions.

Will that help? We think so, but only time will tell.  What I love about it is that it’s subtle and definitely doesn’t deter you from using a coupon code.  I often see articles about “the promo code problem“.  It’s not a problem for us. We want our customers using coupons and getting good deals, and maybe more importantly feeling like they got good deals. It’s part of our business model.  Go ahead and Google “Detailed Image Coupon Code”. You’ll see our coupon code page where we tell you how to get coupons, our Twitter and Facebook accounts where we give away exclusive coupons, forums where we post coupons, and a few coupon code sites where we’ve made sure we signed up and added coupon codes.

While no promotional strategy is without it’s faults, the way we’ve combined  sale products with coupon codes gives our customers the option to pick and chose the types of deals that they like best, be it free product or free shipping or just a flat discount on anything we sell.  We’ve come to learn that different consumers like different types of discounts, and that for the most part the different camps are pretty equally divided.  I think a lot of companies spend an awful lot of time and money quantifying whether free shipping is more popular than 15% off or a free gift.  From our data and our experience,  you’re better off finding a way to offer all of the above and letting the consumer decide which they value more.