3 Quick Tips to Supercharge Your Receipt Conversions

Guest Author

We recently analyzed more than two million receipts sent across more than 8000 different stores to determine which receipts perform better than others.

The best news we can give you is that the size and current success of your store doesn’t influence our findings at all. Neither your current receipt volume, revenue or average order value influences your conversion rate.

So then the question is, how can you supercharge your receipts to result in more sales and conversions? Here’s the three quick tips we’ve identified for you:

1. Discounts conquers all

Our Discount upsell is by far our best-performing single upsell and the data suggests that if you don’t currently use this, you’re missing out on a major opportunity. In fact, when we looked at our top 5% most successful users, then 90% of them were actually using a discount in their receipts.

2. Use at least one upsell

This seems so blatantly obvious, but some of our store owners don’t use any upsell or marketing component in their receipt. Our data however clearly shows that the most successful receipts include at least one upsell and furthermore that receipts with more than one upsell actually increases the click / engagement rate of receipts too (compared to receipts with only one upsell).

We would however give you a word of caution on the latter: when using multiple upsells, keep the messaging consistent and the upsells complimentary. A good example is using a Discount upsell alongside Product Recommendations. On the other hand, using a Discount upsell alongside the Refer-A-Friend module probably dilutes the impact (because it’s confusing / contradictory).

3. Any discount is better than no discount

We know that you are always super-conscious about your gross margins on your products, which sometimes makes discounting hard. We have good news for you though: the actual percentage discount being included in the receipt has no real influence on the subsequent conversion rate.

In our data, we saw that a 5% discount coupon seemed to perform just as well as a 20% discount and slightly better than a 10% and 15% discount. This leads us to the conclusion that any discount included is better than no discount.

We’d definitely recommend that you experiment with this and try multiple different discount percentages to find a sweet-spot that works for you in terms of your conversion rate and your gross margins.


Oh – and here’s some bonus tips…

We got so excited writing this, that we figured we’d include two more tips that doesn’t relate directly to your receipts, but will compliment them greatly.

4. Treat First-Time Buyers & Repeat Customers differently

This is a really great optimisation, because it allows you to use different tactics for different types of customers. One of the tricks that we love is to use our Conditional Logic (CM Commerce Premium only) to only include a discount in a receipt of a first-time buyer. This helps nurture them to make them crucial second purchase, which greatly increases their likelihood of subsequent purchases.

When we do that, we also like using the Refer-A-Friend module for Repeat Purchases. It goes without saying that they’re already more loyal then first-time buyers, which means they’re the perfect type of customer to tell their friends about your store / products.

5. Remind your customers of unused coupons

We recently found that our Follow-Up Emails increases Average Customer Lifetime Value for our store owners by more than 17%. On top of that, the best-performing follow-up e-mail is just a simple reminder to use a coupon that was originally included in a receipt. This simple reminder is triggered only if the coupon remains unused and is fired off 24 hours before it expires.


We hope these tips & tricks helps you to supercharge your receipts even further!

Happy Receipt’ing! 🙂