The empty box at checkout

There is an empty box at the bottom of most checkouts, and in November it costs more than the media.

It is labelled promo code, or discount code, or do you have a voucher. A creator was given a code so that the creator's audience could be counted. An email flow was given a code so that its revenue could be claimed. The box exists so that the marketing team can tell who sent the customer.

What the box says to the customer is something else. It says there is a cheaper price than the one on the screen, and other people have it.

So the customer, item in the basket, card in hand, already decided, opens a new tab. Searches the brand name and the word code. Lands on a coupon site that has scraped every code the brand has ever issued, including the creator's. Copies one. Comes back. Ten per cent off a purchase that was complete in every sense but the last click.

Then the attribution runs. The last click belongs to the coupon site, or to a browser extension that pasted the code in. The affiliate line shows a healthy return on a commission that was paid on top of the discount. The creator whose code leaked shows a spike in redemptions from people who have never heard of them. The paid social line, which did the actual work, shows a drop.

From the platform side this is easy to see and hard to convince a founder of, because every number in it is green. The coupon traffic converts brilliantly. It should. It is made entirely of people who had already converted.

The free traffic from the coupon site is the most expensive traffic on the account. It pays a commission, a discount and a misattribution on the same order, and the order was already yours.

The field invited it. It only needed to exist for the people who had been given something to put in it.