Why Pay What You Want is Better Than Social Discounts
What is happening?
After careful consideration, hours of heated debates and numerous feedback from our most active sellers we decided to discontinue support of the social discounts. This was an important feature for Sellfy in the early days, however, more recently a lot of the variables have changed and we feel like we’d be doing a disservice to our customer if we continue to offer social discounts in its current form. Therefore, we will slowly disable social discounts across all the seller accounts.
On Thursday, 1st of June we will remove the social discounts functionality for all new users (registered after 31 May 2017). On 3rd of July 2017 social discounts will be removed for all Sellfy users. You won’t be able to create or edit already existing social discounts and your buyers won’t be able to share your product to get a discount.
Why are we doing this?
Our decision was based on user feedback and internal data about sales and engagement coming from social discounts. Ultimately, it comes down to these points:
- Facebook and Twitter no longer support this functionality – we can’t control whether buyer actually shared the post on his social media account.
- Often it was a confusing experience for first time Sellfy users, especially for 100% free products with social discount.
- It no longer fulfills the promise of more exposure and sales for the seller. Orders with social discount amount for as few as 0.25% of sales for our most active social discount users.
- There is a better option now for sellers – pay what you want. It removes the upper limit of contributions, so really grateful buyers can pay you $20 for a free product, if they found it really valuable.
Is pay-what-you-want really better than social discounts?
Social discounts works on a premise that you get more exposure to potential clients who you otherwise wouldn’t reach with your marketing. However, as with any other channel, the question is: are these the type of visitors you want to see on your store page?
Luckily we have access to an enormous chunk of data on these discounts and how they perform.
Typical social discount brings in 1.06% additional traffic or 21 additional viewers per month. A typical seller would see a 0.05% more in revenue, if compared to revenue he would get without social discounts. On average, sellers who use social discounts get additional $0.21 per month from product with social discount.
The situation with pay-what-you-want is quite different. On average, revenue from products with pwyw is 223% higher, when compared to revenue you would receive without pwyw. On average, sellers get extra $5 per order. As there is no upper limit for extra donation with pay what you want, some sellers get hundreds of extra dollars that way. At this point, you should seriously consider if you can afford not using pay what you want.
What’s next?
This change will help us focus on features that really move the needle for the sellers, including developing a shopping cart (coming real soon), advanced analytics, upselling and more.
Over to you
Are you already using pay what you want instead of social discounts? Are you sad to see social discounts go?
