Flash sales display
with a live countdown

The alternative is not a smaller discount. It is a different sentence, and there are only three kinds that actually move anything:

• Scarcity that is true. «Six left», «last batch until October». It works because it is checkable, and it stops working permanently the first time someone finds out it was not.
• A time window. «Until eleven», «Thursdays only». This is the one that pays best, because it moves demand into hours you were open anyway rather than reducing what you earn in the busy ones.
• A reason the customer did not have. A new supplier, a season, something that arrived today. It gives permission to buy without touching the price at all.

The practical test before writing anything: would this sentence still be worth showing at full price? If yes, you have a reason. If the only interesting part is the number, you have a discount — and it should then be treated as a budget decision, with an end date, rather than as content.

There is one situation where the percentage is clearly the right answer and it is worth naming: stock you need gone by a date. Seasonal, perishable, discontinued. Here the margin is already lost and the only question is how fast — which is exactly what a number communicates and a reason does not.

Look at the last five things you promoted. If four of them were percentages, the constraint is probably not your pricing — it is that nobody had ten minutes to think of anything else, which is a much cheaper problem to fix.

A flash that repeats stops being a flash and becomes the price. «Thursdays only» is a good sentence the first three times. Run it forty weeks in a row and you have not promoted anything: you have simply announced that Thursday is cheaper, and taught the regulars to do their shopping on Thursday at the price you were trying to protect the rest of the week. Nothing on the screen tells you this is happening, because the screen has no memory and the takings drift down slowly.

And there is a harder consequence that almost nobody sees coming: you can lose the right to advertise the discount at all. Everyone knows a «was» price has to be honest. What far fewer people know is that the reference is defined for you — under the EU price-indication rules an announced reduction has to be measured against the lowest price you charged in the previous 30 days, not against your list price. Which means the weekly flash quietly rewrites your own baseline: after a month of Thursdays at €29, your legal «was» is €29, and the €40 you have been comparing against no longer exists as far as the rule is concerned. The tool that made discounting free is the same tool that erodes the number the discount was supposed to be measured from.

So the useful artefact is not the offer. It is the calendar with blank weeks in it. Four or five dated campaigns a year with the full price standing between them beat a permanent trickle, and they beat it on both counts: the price stays comparable to something, and the offer stays worth noticing. If your promotional calendar has no empty weeks on it, it is not a calendar — it is a new price list you have not admitted to yet.

The revert is the feature, not the countdown. The visible timer is what customers look at; the thing that actually protects you is that at the end time the screen puts the full price back on its own, with nobody having to remember. A poster stays up until someone takes it down, which in practice means a fortnight, and a fortnight is exactly how a promotion turns into a baseline. Set the end time when you set the offer, not afterwards — afterwards never arrives.

To be straight with you: we show what you type and revert it when you said to, and that is the extent of it. What you may claim as a previous price, and how the rules apply to your sector and country, is a question for your own advisers — not for a screen supplier.

The fix is not a smaller discount: it is that the condition is as readable as the number. « £2.50 with card · £3.20 without » on the same slide, in the same weight, settles it before anyone reaches the queue. An asterisk does not — an asterisk is read by people who already suspect something, and they are not the ones who end up complaining. Both figures are true, and showing both is the difference between a customer who feels informed and one who feels sold to.

There is a commercial argument for the honest version that most shops miss: the gap is what recruits members. Somebody standing at the shelf comparing two numbers has a reason to sign up right there, calmly. The same person at the till, holding up a queue and being told they could have paid less, is not going to fill in a form: they are going to pay and be annoyed. The screen reaches them at the only moment when joining is an easy decision rather than an embarrassing one.

And a rule for whoever writes the slides: the condition travels with the price, never one slide later. A rotation that shows the price first and the terms afterwards is worse than no rotation at all, because a person who walks away after four seconds leaves with exactly half the information — and that half is the half that generates the argument. If the two do not fit together on one screen, the offer is too complicated to be advertised that way.

What we cannot do, plainly: we have no connection to your loyalty system, so nothing here shows a personalised price or knows who is standing in front of it. Everything above is about wording, not technology. And how conditional pricing must be presented is a consumer-law question that has moved in recent years — your trade body will know, and we will not.