We added a 50% discount code in our T&C’s to see what would happen

The Story

In April 2015 GeoDirectory became 1 year old, at that time we celebrated by running a discount over our birthday weekend. It had been a year since we wrote our terms and conditions (T&C’s) and in June of that year (2015) we decided to review them to see if anything needed updating, it was a boring read and everything seemed good with no changes required but it got me thinking:

“Who actually reads these?”

It was then we decided we would find out and we covertly placed a 50% discount code in our T&C’s wording, we initially placed a 48 hour time limit on the code in case it “got out of control”… 48 hours came and went and nothing, so we removed the time limit and kept an eye on it. Every month i would check it and it had not been used, eventually 8 Months!!! later someone actually used the 50% code, i remember thinking to myself:

“You deserve every penny of that discount”

We wondered if the user would start broadcasting his find and we considered removing it, but curiosity got the better of us and we decided to leave it and see what would happen, after all it was 8 months before anyone presumably read the entirety of our T&C’s, who would be next…
Another 9 months went by before it was used again (Nov 2016), the first user was from California and the second user was from Ontario so i didn’t suspect it had been passed on, it seemed “John” the first customer had kept our little secret to himself.

Does any one read T&C’s or do we all just lie? I remember years ago when i was at university one of my class mates ran a popular forum with over 15k users, in his T&C’s he specified that by registering on the forum he was entitled to your first born child… I presume no children were ever handed over but also no one ever complained…

The third user to use our code was at the start of this month (from Bucharest), so that works out at 3 users in over 20 months who found and used our hidden 50% discount code.

Conclusion

I guess all that can be concluded from this is either thousands of customers didn’t want a discount or they all lied and said they had read the T&C’s.

We decided we will keep the code there for 48 hours from when this blog post is published, maybe it will tell us how many people read our blog. Happy reading! 🙂