Your discount announcement belongs on every type of page a visitor opens during the sale, in a form that suits the decision they make on that page. The home page and category pages state the offer and the sale dates. Product cards and product pages show whether that product is part of the sale and what the customer will pay, and the cart confirms that the discount has actually been applied. If the sale uses a code, the code itself should be waiting somewhere that stays in view as the visitor scrolls, such as a discount tab at the edge of the page.
Once you have read to the end, you will be able to decide which element goes on which page in your next sale and where to show the code. You will also know whether to stop the rotating banners on your home page for the length of the sale and which figure to show as the strikethrough price. The examples follow a single imaginary campaign: the “Autumn Sale”, 30% off selected products, with the discount applied automatically in the cart, from 10:00 on Monday, November 2, to 23:59 on Sunday, November 8.
Start with the pages where visitors land
The big banner on the home page may be the first place that comes to mind, but the answer to “how do you announce a sale on your website?” does not end there. Some of the visitors who arrive during a sale never see the home page at all. Someone who taps an Instagram ad lands on the page of the product in the ad, someone who searches Google for a product name lands on the product or category page shown in the results, and a customer who taps the link in a WhatsApp message lands on whichever page the message links to. Your home page announcement reaches these visitors only if they go on to the home page.
Begin your preparation with the landing page report in your analytics tool, and look at your last one or two sale periods. Rank the page types where visits began: home page, category, product, blog. Divide the effort you put into announcements according to that ranking. If most visits start on product pages, put the most care into the price block on the product page.
When you bring in the traffic yourself, through ads or messages, you also choose the page visitors land on. Point the links in your campaign ads and messages to a single page that lists the sale products, rather than to the home page; our campaign announcement message examples show how to include that link in a message. Product ads, on the other hand, take visitors straight to a product page, and for those visitors it is the price line on the product page that tells them about the sale. If your platform allows it, set up a separate category or tag page for the campaign, and point the links in the hero banner, the announcement bar, the discount tab, the message and the campaign ad to that same address. Whichever announcement visitors come from, they see the same product list, and you can track the campaign’s traffic on a single page.
One campaign on the home page, in a banner that stays still
The home page banner should carry the campaign’s key facts: the discount rate, the products it covers, and the start and end dates. All of them should be readable on the first screen, without scrolling on a phone. For the example campaign, the text on the hero banner could read:
Autumn Sale: 30% off selected products. The discount comes off automatically in your cart; no code needed. November 2–8, until 23:59 on Sunday. [See the sale products]
Where your theme allows it, keep the text out of the image and put it above or below the image as page text. Text inside an image made for desktop shrinks on a phone and becomes hard to read, while page text stays readable on every screen. If you can upload a separate image for phones, put only the rate and the dates on that one, in large type.
Added as just one of the slides in your home page slider, the campaign image becomes easier for visitors to miss. In a 2013 Nielsen Norman Group article on auto-rotating carousels, a participant was trying to find out whether Siemens had a discount on its washing machines. The discount sat at the very top of the page, in its most prominent spot, yet the participant missed it: the carousel moved on to the next slide before there was time to read the text. Concluding that the brand had no washing machine deal, the participant gave up the search. For the duration of the sale, cut the hero area down to a single slide or pin the campaign slide in place; you can switch the slider back on when the sale is over.
Any countdown timer on the hero banner should run to the actual end time; a timer that starts over each time the page loads contradicts the end date you have published.
When two campaigns run in the same period (for example, a general discount and a code just for new members), put the bigger one in the hero banner and the bar at the top of the page, and leave the other to the discount tab or the campaign bell. Try to explain both offers in a single banner and both become hard to read.
Category pages and product cards show what the sale covers
The phrase “selected products” leaves customers with a question: which ones? The product cards on the category page answer it. Put the same badge on the card of every product in the sale, with the discount rate on it: “30%”. Badges without a figure, such as “Deal” or “Promo”, make customers click through to the product and work out the price for themselves. Türkiye’s Regulation on Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices also prohibits statements and images that could mislead consumers by causing confusion about which products are discounted or how much of a discount is applied (Article 14/2).
Show the discounted price on the card together with the previous price, struck through. If the discount is applied in the cart and your platform cannot calculate the discounted price on the card, at least add the line “30% off in your cart” right below the price. Customers who see no discount on the card may never click on the product, while those who read the line know in advance that the price will drop in the cart.
At the top of the category page, just above the product list, add a one-line note with the scope and dates of the sale. If your filters include an option such as “Sale items”, you can point the links in the bar and the banner to that filtered view. When only part of a category is in the sale, the filter saves customers from hunting for badges among forty products.
Put the sale next to the price on the product page
On the product page, place the sale information as close as possible to the “Add to cart” button, together with the price. The bar at the top or the tab at the edge helps, but the customer checking the price should find what they are looking for right beside it. The price block should include the discounted price, the previous price struck through and the dates of the sale. If your platform can show the discounted price on the product page, the price block could look like this (prices in Turkish lira, TL); if it cannot, write “700 TL in your cart” below the price:
1,000 TL (struck through) 700 TL · 30% off in the Autumn Sale · November 2–8, until 23:59 on Sunday
State a conditional offer right above the button
Offers such as “buy 2, pay for 1”, “20% off when you buy 3” or “free shipping over 1,500 TL” depend on a condition, and customers should learn that condition before they add the product to the cart. Write it in one short sentence directly above the quantity selector or the “Add to cart” button: “Buy 2 of this item and the second one is free. Offer valid November 2–8.” If the offer applies across different products, say which one is free as well: “The lowest-priced item in your cart is free.”
Add a line to the pages of products that are not in the sale, too. If “30%” appears everywhere on your site and the page of a product outside the sale says nothing about it, customers find out only in the cart that the discount does not apply to that product. “This product is not included in the Autumn Sale” is a small line, but it saves customers from getting to the cart, looking for the discount there and losing trust in your store.
The legal rules on strikethrough prices and dates
Article 14 of the Regulation on Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices requires any advertisement that contains a written, audio or visual statement indicating a discount to state, clearly and comprehensibly, the price before the discount, the start and end dates of the discounted sale and, if the quantity of the discounted product is limited, that quantity. In a 2020 statement, Türkiye’s Ministry of Trade treated discount statements on websites as falling under this article too. A letter the Ministry sent to trade bodies in June 2026 lists the failure to give start and end dates among frequently encountered violations. So write the start and end dates together in every announcement. If you are going to say “while stocks last”, also show what the limit is.
An amendment to the Regulation published on July 1, 2026, came into force on August 1, 2026, and changed how the price before the discount is determined. For goods other than perishables such as fruit and vegetables, the reference is the lowest price applied in the ten days before the discount starts; from March 2022 until the 2026 amendment, that period was thirty days. If a product is sold through more than one sales channel, only the price in the channel where the discount is offered counts; a price in one channel cannot serve as the basis for a discount in another. According to the Ministry of Trade’s announcement, conditional sales advertisements, which tie a discount or another benefit to a condition, are now also subject to the rules on discounted sales; the Regulation applies all of the article’s provisions to them except the rule on stating the quantity. Put the start and end dates on your “buy 2, pay for 1” or “20% off when you buy 3” line as well, and ask your legal adviser how to announce a free shipping threshold that has no end date.
In practice, the strikethrough price should be the lowest price actually charged on your site in the ten days before the sale starts; a price increase made during those ten days does not raise the strikethrough price. Check the rate on the badge against that price for every product as well: on a product that sold for less during another discount in the last ten days, the actual discount may come out below 30%. Do not use your marketplace price as the basis for the discount on your site. Under Article 9 of the Regulation, it is up to the advertiser to prove that the claims in an advertisement are accurate, so keep your price history after the sale is over. Also talk to your legal adviser about the details of your own situation, about how badges and bars on your site will be assessed, and about how to show the price before the discount in a hero banner or bar that covers many products.
Show the discount in the cart and don’t make customers hunt for a code
Give the discount applied in the cart a separate line that carries the campaign’s name: “Autumn Sale −300 TL”. If the price customers saw on the product page does not show up in the cart, they may conclude that the announcement was misleading and leave without asking.
For conditional offers, add a progress line to the cart with a figure that updates automatically: “Add 240 TL more for free shipping.” Customers can see how close they are to the condition without doing the math. During sales, also state on that line whether the threshold is based on the discounted total or the list price. If it is based on the discounted total, a customer who picks a 1,800 TL product expects free shipping, but with 30% off, the cart drops to 1,260 TL, 240 TL short of the 1,500 TL threshold. Once the threshold is passed, have the line switch to “Your shipping is free” so customers can see they have met the condition.
In Baymard Institute’s checkout testing, some participants left the site to look for a code when they saw the code field; according to Baymard, once users leave the site, they become significantly less likely to complete the purchase. Baymard recommends hiding the field behind a link and automatically applying any discounts the cart qualifies for. If your campaign has no code, put the code field behind a “Have a discount code?” link, but do not remove it; it may still be needed for other codes, such as a new-member code or a code won by spinning a wheel. Also say in the cart that the discount has already been applied.
When a spin-to-win wheel is also running on the site, decide in advance whether a code won on the wheel can be added on top of the campaign discount, and state your decision clearly in your campaign copy.
In a campaign with a code, put the code where customers can copy it before they reach the cart. You can use Pushouse’s discount tab for this. Visitors copy the code from the tab and paste it into the field in the cart, without having to leave a name, phone number or email address. On phones, set the tab at a height where it does not sit on top of the WhatsApp button or a sticky “Add to cart” bar. If the example campaign used the code AUTUMN30, the tab text could look like this; the code itself is not written into the text but appears in the copy box:
Autumn Sale
30% off selected products. Copy the code and use it in your cart.
November 2–8, until 23:59 on Sunday. Not valid on products outside the sale.
Do not add any new announcement at checkout. The customer’s job at that step is to enter delivery and payment details, and a new offer, a progress bar or a popup distracts them from it. Showing the applied discount and its amount in the order summary is enough.
Give the bar, the tab, the bell and the popup separate jobs
Put the same message in the bar, the tab, the bell and the popup, and the screen gets crowded without any of them standing out. The same visitor should not be faced with a bar, an open tab, the bell’s badge and a popup all at once. Divide the elements among your pages: on product pages, do not use a popup that appears as soon as the page opens, and on the home page and category pages, show it only after the visitor has been looking around the page for a while. The tab and the bell can stay on the page, since they do not open unless the visitor taps them.
The thin announcement bar at the very top of the page comes ready-made in many e-commerce themes, and because it appears on every page, it is an effortless way to carry the campaign beyond the home page. The bar has room for a single line: write the offer and the dates, and link it to the campaign page.
Autumn Sale: 30% off selected products · November 2–8, until 23:59 on Sunday · See the products
Do not have the bar cycle through the free shipping threshold, the campaign and a membership perk; just as in the slider, the message can disappear there before anyone reads it. The tab, the bell and the popup divide the work like this:
- The tab at the edge of the page is useful when there is a code the customer has to copy or a single page they need to go to.
- The campaign bell is for when you have more than one announcement at the same time: a general discount, a members-only offer, a shipping threshold.
- The popup is for moments when you want something from the visitor: permission to contact them, or the answer to a question. Do not use it just to make an announcement.
In the e-commerce campaign bell, each offer is a separate line in the list, and you can make each line visible only to members or only to non-members, so a members-only offer does not appear to visitors who are not members. If you give members an extra discount, do not show the two rates side by side; write the total rate or the final price the customer will pay. If a further 10% comes off the 30%-off price in the cart, a 1,000 TL product drops first to 700 TL and then to 630 TL, a total discount of 37%. If you add the two rates together and write “40%”, you will have announced a discount you are not actually giving. The line members see could read:
37% off in total for members
A further 10% comes off the 30%-off price of sale items in your cart: a 1,000 TL product costs 630 TL. November 2–8, until 23:59 on Sunday.
On phones, do not use a full-screen popup to announce the sale. Google’s Search documentation says that popups covering the content make it harder for search engines to understand the page and can erode visitors’ trust in the site; it recommends banners that take up only a small part of the screen instead. The thin bar at the top of the page is that kind of banner. If visitors who come from an ad to a product page are met with a campaign popup in the first second, you force them to close it before they see the product they came for.
A popup is useful in a campaign at two moments. A few days before the sale starts, you can ask visitors, “Would you like us to let you know on WhatsApp when the sale starts?” and, on the first day of the sale, message those who opted in.
The second moment is when a visitor is about to leave without buying. If you want to find out why, do not put a new offer in front of them; use an exit-intent popup to show a one-question survey that asks the reason for leaving, with answer options: “Price”, “Shipping terms”, “The product I want isn’t in the sale”. The answer that keeps coming back tells you what visitors could not find in the campaign. If “Shipping terms” comes up more and more, make the free shipping threshold more visible in the bar and in the cart; if “The product I want isn’t in the sale” keeps growing, give the scope line more prominence on category and product pages. You can read what such a survey can reveal on the cart, product and home pages in our e-commerce exit survey article.
Launch, update and remove every announcement together
Switch on the bar, the hero banner, the badges, the tab and the bell together, the minute the sale starts. If one goes live early or late, customers see 30% on one page but not on another. In the first few minutes, browse the site on your own phone in this order: home page, campaign page, a product in the sale, a product outside the sale, cart. If the bell has a line visible only to members, do the walk-through twice, once logged in as a member and once logged out. Every page should show the same rate, the same dates and, in a campaign with a code, the same code; if “AUTUMN30” appears as “AUTUMN-30” somewhere, customers will try the wrong one.
If you are also announcing the sale on WhatsApp, send the message only to customers who have opted in, and link it to the campaign page. Begin your WhatsApp bulk messaging after the campaign has gone live, so that customers who read the message and visit the site find the bar and the badges already in place. The rate, scope and dates in the message should be exactly the same as on the site.
If you want to measure how many clicks the tab or the bar gets, do not add UTM parameters to their internal links. UTM parameters are meant for links that bring visitors to the site from outside; used within the site, they can hand that element the credit for an order that an ad or a WhatsApp message actually brought in. Track the clicks as a separate event in your analytics tool.
Keep an eye on stock while the sale is running. Move sold-out products to the end of the list; a product that keeps its badge but cannot be bought wastes the most visible spot in the campaign list. If you change the scope or add products to the campaign, update the bar, the category note and the tab text at the same time. Prepare a separate line for the last day and add it to the bell; when the list is updated, the announcements show as unread again, even for visitors who have opened the bell before:
Last day: Autumn Sale
30% off selected products · November 2–8 · Ends tonight at 23:59.
As soon as the end time arrives, take every announcement down at once. A tab showing an expired code or a 30% badge that is no longer valid sends customers looking for a discount that is not in the cart, and it makes the end date you published meaningless. If you extend the sale, write the new end date in every announcement at the same time and remove the “last day” line.
Once the sale is over, open the landing page report again and put two lists side by side: the pages where visits started, and where the announcement sat on each of those pages. If more visitors came in through product pages, give priority in your next campaign to the line in the price block; if more customers asked about the discount in the cart, give it to the discount line in the cart.
