What is your view on discounts?

You can use real discounts which have a real deadline. Here the discount is on your website, in your store, etc., and has a specific date when it ends the product goes back to a regular price.

You can also have a regular price for your product and use coupons. Here the discount is not listed on your website or your site, or but may only be available to select buyers, affiliates, newsletter subscribers, etc.

A discount could also be based on a quantity purchase, such as number of items or length of time purchased.

As for fake discounts which forever list a fake price and a 'discounted' price for today only (and every day) I wouldn't worry about what someone else does. But, if you have a comparison page you could flip their advertising to your advantage.

Example: Would you trust your valuable website to a host that lies to you from day 1 to make a nickel? Check out our competitor's ad graphic which claims blah blah blah. Here at [our company] we believe in honesty and delivering a truly remarkable service to our customers. If someone lies to get your business they are probably lying about everything else. Check out our testimonials .....

For legal reasons I'd make sure my butt was well protected with plenty of documentation.

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The discount offer is what gets people to bite. The bottom line is, you have to make the math work for you. If you can hook the customer with an offer and have a way to extract more money from them, it's a winning transaction. That's why low introductory offers work well when you can get a minimum time commitment to recoup the money you sacrificed to get new business.

You have to be careful though, many restaurants no longer want to offer a Groupon type offer because instead of hooking the customer with a major discount in hopes of return business, a large number of "Coupon Whores" have been created who now mostly go where they can find a major discount. You are not losing money on food costs by offering hosting. Maybe your issues are bandwidth usage. You can decide if it is worth your while to try offering a discount, if you can collect for extended hosting, so it all works out in the end.

When people hear the word discount, something just clicks in their heads. It's how the brain works, it's only normal. Even if the discounts you talk about aren't actually real, they're still discounts to the people who don't know it. Look at it as a marketing strategy, offering discounts or freebies are the best ways to attract people to your business.

Along with discounting, IMHO you have to talk about pricing, positioning,
and levels/quality of service or product. And, you have to train your customers
by explaining why you do things the way you do.

I had a friend who is amongst the first web designers/webmasters ever.
He and his partner hand coded and designed each site. He preferred
liquidweb (I'm pretty sure I recall correctly) because if he had a problem he
could talk to a level 3 tech. He strongly believed they were worth the extra
money to him and his clients. He did not care about discounts.

My hotel used to be priced about $5 to $10 more than the cheap hotel in town.
We had more bad revues and more complaints about value and our breakfast
offerings than we do now. Now we are $30 to $50 above the cheap hotel, and
getting great reviews and compliments about value...

We have hit a completely different market and just plain nicer people with more
money to spend, and they are more relaxed about finances. The economy may
be better than two years ago. But, the only noticeable difference at my hotel is
that we have really nice new carpet and the best padding.

With respect to discounting, you have to be very careful about attracting bargain
hunters versus your ideal customer. (Back to positioning.) (I tried contacting Groupon
and never heard back from them, and I am glad for it.)

For most any company, IMHO an honest deal is the only way to go. I think people
see through the false scarcity tactics, and through the 'discount' that is off the
fake high price.

Besides a flat out discount, you can offer a good value on a package deal, volume deal,
or good pricing on something like a yearly payment versus monthly.

At my hotel I offer (with black out periods during holidays) 10% off to members
of such groups as the American Automobile Association, AARP, teachers, school
district employees, police, fire, military, government...

I offer the lowest rate I can to frequent customers. It is on an informal basis
and in the 10 to 20% range. (I need to CRM this.)

I offer a group rate to wedding parties and such. It may or may not be discounted off retail
because contrary to a lot of thinking, even though they are booking a lot of rooms, it might
be when we are going to sell out at retail regardless. I make the organizer feel they are
getting a special deal and tell them to tell their guests to ask for the Smith wedding party
rate. (I hope no future customers are reading this.) It's not super strait forward, but losing
money on a group is not good. Groups, especially wedding parties and music events, are
often more work, security, and cleaning.

I usually don't match offers to people who say the other hotel offered $65 including tax.
Especially if current retail is a lot higher. "I've come down from $99 to $80. I'm sorry and
that's as far as I am willing to go." (Unless it's a sweet grandma type.) Part of training the
customer base and reaching the customers I want. I think my customers are paying for
a good, safe, respectful atmosphere in addition to clean rooms and our amenities.

Dan

Discount is one easy way to market your business. It gives a sense of urgency to your customers especially if it’s ‘time limited offer’. With too many businesses of the same niche it’s important to do something or use strategies that could help you shine and one of those is giving discount and promo offers. As for offering fake discounts, many companies really do that but I advise against this. Fake discounts usually lure customers but when they find out about this deception you’ll end up losing more customers than you can afford.

Don't compete on price - especially with the big boys like godaddy.

Target more tech savvy people, web designers/developers, IT.
They know what they are looking for and don't care so much about discounts or cheap.

Position yourself like the auto dealers or furniture stores that
stress fair pricing without games, quality of service, equipment and employees...

Appeal to reasonable, smart people who know what a speedy website that is up all the time
means to their business, or their client's business.

maybe even make fun of the "other guys" and their gamesmanship (without getting sued of course)

dan

In what world do you live men are you from English royalty,why blame people for wanting discount prices,please dont be ridiculous and have ready always some true coupons on your whmcs,and one thing more dont you dare to remove them ok?

Ye take it like a men and true warrior

I have a love/hate relationships with discounts. If you have to discount its because you have not shown enough value in your product. You need to focus on providing more value than on providing more discounts.

When you discount you actually devalue your product and that is a slipperly slope. If they find less value, they are less likely to stay your customer as someone else with a deeper discount will come calling and take them away.

If you provide exceptional value and they understand that value you will keep your customer for a longer time.

I also find that a lot of hosting companies offer steep discounts as lost leaders. They then try to upsell you on addon services and such.

It does work, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it.

Discount is always good and most webmasters look for new hosting even though
they happy with the one they have.
New websites and new servers is what I meant.
Discount will make their decisions easy to get yours to test.
Use FB Offer and then Fbads.
I think it will be the best choice.

"discount" is a word that means "bargain" "cheap" when used up front. You can paint pictures with other words if you don't want that association, but everyone loves to get something for less.

So, "$100 discount today off our $300 price" gets one type of shopper whereas "Regular value of $300, but enjoy a courtesy savings of $100 today" gets another.

I found for some reason if I would give a new customer 1 time discount I would make more sales and make more money than if I didn't offer the discount. Test it out advertise a certain discount if they order by a certain date. And I also found that customers stayed around longer if I gave them a good deal.