Coupon Fatigue in 2026: Why Shoppers Are Tuning Out Sitewide Sales

The Discount Isn't Special Anymore

For years, the playbook was simple: run a sitewide sale, watch orders climb. That playbook is wearing thin. Ahead of Black Friday 2025, AlixPartners surveyed more than 9,000 US consumers across 140 retailers and found shoppers experiencing what researchers are bluntly calling "discount burnout" — price has slipped from the top purchase driver, with quality, service, and authenticity now weighing more heavily in the decision.

The strange part is that shoppers aren't abandoning discounts entirely — they're just numb to the volume. AlixPartners also found nearly 40% of consumers still planned to make half or more of their holiday purchases on sale, even while reporting fatigue with the promotions themselves. People want the deal. They've just stopped being moved by the announcement of one.

The Timeline of Fatigue

Optimove's 2025 holiday research quantified how fast that numbness sets in: 47% of consumers already felt tired of holiday marketing by October, climbing to 63% by the end of November — before the biggest sale days of the year had even finished.

Over-Discounting Can Actively Cost You Customers

This isn't just a diminishing-returns story — it can tip into brand damage. A Power Digital study around Black Friday–Cyber Monday 2025 found 10.6% of consumers said they'd abandon a brand they felt was over-discounted. Adidas and GoPro are frequently cited as cautionary examples of "price erosion" from constant retailer-wide markdowns eating into how shoppers perceive the product's actual value.

Some of the biggest names in retail have said the quiet part out loud. Kohl's has publicly described a shift away from blanket promotions: reducing the number of general promotional offers while "leaning into more targeted and personalized offers" instead.

Merchants Feel It From the Other Side, Too

The fatigue isn't only about how discounts land with shoppers — merchants are dealing with the mechanics of blanket codes breaking down. On r/ecommerce, one merchant described the problem of public codes turning up on coupon aggregator sites, creating friction and mistrust right at checkout when a code doesn't work as advertised. Another described a customer who placed 15 orders over six months by creating a new email address for every purchase to keep re-using a first-time-customer code.

Not every merchant frames this as a problem to solve — some have made peace with it philosophically. One widely-shared take on r/shopify argued that a sitewide discount "should already [be] price[d] in" to your baseline margin — that a 10% code isn't really a discount at all, it's just the minimum price you were willing to accept all along, dressed up as a promotion.

A Regulatory Signal Worth Watching

It's worth noting there's growing scrutiny of pricing that shoppers don't get to see or agree to. In August 2026 the FTC proposed an Enforcement Policy Statement on personalized pricing, and more than 35 algorithmic-pricing bills were introduced across US states in the first two months of 2026 alone. That scrutiny is aimed at pricing decided for a shopper, invisibly. It's a useful contrast for anything the shopper opts into and can see the terms of — a coupon code they choose to apply, or an offer they choose to submit — which is a fundamentally different transaction than a price silently adjusted based on browsing behavior.

What This Means for Your Discount Strategy

Put together, the data points in one direction: broad, repeated, sitewide discounting is losing its edge, both because shoppers have stopped reacting to it and because it's harder to run cleanly (leaked codes, repeat-abuse, margin erosion). The alternative isn't "no discounts" — it's narrower, more deliberate ones. A discount a shopper has to actively ask for, on a specific product they're already considering, avoids most of this fatigue simply because it isn't background noise; it's a direct response to something the shopper did.

The Bottom Line

Sitewide sales aren't dead, but they're doing less work than they used to, and running more of them isn't the fix. If you want to stay in the discount conversation without training every visitor to wait for the next blanket code, put the ask in the shopper's hands instead of blasting it to everyone. Install Lury to let shoppers request a deal on the specific product they're already looking at.