What are the two most attractive words, you can use in your advertisement to lure customers? Answer is Discount and Free, and although “Free” can pull much larger crowds as compared to “Discount”, you can’t really offer your products for free. Therefore, discount is a more practical, sensible and smart option to use. Different types of discounts and sales are very effective to curb the competition. It can also provide a good boost to your sales in the time of recession, when people are looking to save on every deal. However, offering discount on your products will obviously reduce the inflow of cash, therefore you need to chew over your discount strategy over and over, keeping in mind all costs and expenditures. In addition to this, there are some laws in developed countries that impose some restrictions on discounts; you need to confirm to these regulations as well.

Here are some of the discounts you can offer to your customers.

Quantity Based Discount:

You must have noticed a huge difference between wholesale and retail price. Whenever you buy something in large quantities you expect some discount from the seller. People are more than happy to offer low prices to a buyer who will purchase in large quantities because it allows the seller to save in many ways. But normally these quantities are too large for a normal consumer and only businesses can afford to purchase a product in these quantities, however you can offer some sort of off-price if the customer buy more than one units, for example 5% off if someone purchases 10 units or more.

Payment Based Discount:

If majority of your customers make purchase on credit then you can offer payment based discounts to these customers, tempting them to pay as soon as possible by offering a small discount on paying cash without delay. Prompt payments will save you all those collection costs and help you with daily expenditures of the business, as well.

Trade Discounts:

These are the discounts you have to offer to the middleman, be it the wholesaler, retailer or distributor, so that they can cover all costs of marketing that may be needed before the product reaches to the ultimate consumer. Trade discounts are in fact, the biggest of all.

Special Discount:

In some cases you can offer discounts to some specific group of customers to capture that special segment of the market. This niche group can be of students, house wives, doctors, your previous customers, small business owners or any other strategically targeted group.

William King is the director of UK Wholesale Suppliers, Distributors, Dropshippers & Manufacturers: http://www.wholesalepages.co.uk , Wholesale Trade Suppliers, Dropshippers, Distributors & Manufacturers: http://www.dailytrader.com , China Wholesale Suppliers, Distributors, Dropshippers & Manufacturers: http://www.dailytrader.com/china/ and Active Trader Links & Online Business Investing Services Directory: http://www.activetrader-links.com . He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has been helping retailers, entrepreneurs and startups with their product sourcing, promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.