Actually, that is more difficult - trying to explain an alternative workflow to a customer over the phone is not nearly as easy as it sounds. "Enter this coupon code in the field you see on your screen," is much easier than "Ok, type in this new URL exactly, now, once you've done that, add this to your shopping cart, now go to checkout..."
I've had to watch a lot of this sort of thing happen, and customers "understand" coupon codes natively at this point - they require practically no instruction. Getting the customer through the transaction as quickly as possible is one of the prime desires for any e-commerce site that also takes phone orders, and coupon codes have been, in my experience, most effective for that.
Now, if you want to start a trend of re-training customers to expect specialized URLs they use before entering checkout -- then I'll be more than happy to switch over to that once customers expect it.
However, I feel there's a sort of paradox here: Providing discounts to new customers helps create new transactions. The more steps required to complete the transaction, the more like the customer is to abandon the transaction. If a coupon code causes customers without one to be more likely to abandon then it makes sense to require a separate step from the normal checkout workflow to use it, thereby increasing the rate of abandoned transactions.
I've had to watch a lot of this sort of thing happen, and customers "understand" coupon codes natively at this point - they require practically no instruction. Getting the customer through the transaction as quickly as possible is one of the prime desires for any e-commerce site that also takes phone orders, and coupon codes have been, in my experience, most effective for that.
Now, if you want to start a trend of re-training customers to expect specialized URLs they use before entering checkout -- then I'll be more than happy to switch over to that once customers expect it.
However, I feel there's a sort of paradox here: Providing discounts to new customers helps create new transactions. The more steps required to complete the transaction, the more like the customer is to abandon the transaction. If a coupon code causes customers without one to be more likely to abandon then it makes sense to require a separate step from the normal checkout workflow to use it, thereby increasing the rate of abandoned transactions.