There were plenty of coupons, so why didn't the benefits feel real?

Coupons are an area where growth strategy, category operations, and partner collaboration requirements are all tangled together, so the structure kept getting more complex. From an operational standpoint this was reasonable, but to customers the coupons appeared scattered across multiple places, and it wasn't immediately clear which coupon was optimal.

To verify this, we ran a UT (Usability Test), and customers repeatedly asked, "This is the one with the biggest discount, right?" — unsure whether the current price was actually the final benefit. The cause wasn't the coupon structure itself, but the fact that the structure hadn't been translated into the customer's language.

The direction for improvement was to consistently show the maximum benefit price across the entire funnel. On the PLP, we made customers aware that a benefit existed; on the PDP/ILP, we helped them understand the maximum benefit; and on the order form, we showed the price difference before and after application together with the coupon name and coupon type, so customers could be convinced of the optimal choice without needing to compare or calculate.

At the same time, we reorganized the coupon structure — which had been scattered across categories — based on UX criteria, and unified the unintuitive coupon names and types into language customers could immediately understand. Rather than treating this as a one-time fix, we documented these criteria as shared team principles.

As a result, coupons were no longer an 'option to choose,' but became a structure that customers could immediately understand as "this is the best choice." As a result, lead time decreased, and coupon usage increased by 44%. The key wasn't increasing the discount rate further, but creating a moment where the benefit was understood.