The Challenge
Better Bathrooms is a specialist retailer offering a wide range of bathroom products, from fixtures to fittings. Like many ecommerce teams, they’ve used discounting to reduce product detail page (PDP) abandonment. However, with limited data to guide when and to whom these offers were shown, they faced a difficult trade-off: accept higher exit rates or risk margin by offering discounts too broadly.
Fixed discount rules and generic triggers often force a choice between margin erosion or missed conversions. This is a common challenge across ecommerce, and Better Bathrooms was playing that game.
Without intent signals, discounting decisions were blunt. The business couldn’t isolate visitors with high incremental value (AKA those who might convert with a nudge) and had no clear way to trigger offers with confidence.
The Hypothesis
By targeting discounts at visitors who have built intent to purchase but look likely to abandon, we would reduce the level of PDP abandonment without giving money away to users who would have bought anyway (or were never going to buy).
What if discounting could be more precise, contextual, and protective of margin? The Better Bathrooms team believed that by identifying signs of hesitation in real-time, they could offer incentives to visitors who truly needed them, improving their experience.
The goal wasn’t to discount more or less often, but to discount smarter. In fact, The Intent Gap report found that 83% of shoppers have used a discount code despite being ready to pay full price. This is a clear sign that better targeting can protect margin without hurting performance.
With intent, and access to real-time data, price thresholds could be used to segment discount value based on actual visitor behaviour, not assumptions. And if the right signals were surfaced at the right moment, PDP exits could become recoveries.
The Solution
Better Bathrooms activated Made With Intent to detect abandonment signals in real-time and trigger price-threshold-based discounts accordingly. They focused on visitors in the Maintain Intent Abandon segment. We define these as visitors who had already built purchase intent that needed maintaining, but were now displaying signs of drop-off in the maintain intent phase of their journey.
The signals our AI agent identified included things like scroll behaviour, hesitations, and product comparison loops. Anything that suggested waning confidence. When a visitor matched this behaviour and segment, a contextually relevant discount was offered. Not to every visitor, but only to those who were likely to convert if prompted and unlikely to return if left unaddressed.
This approach was fully integrated with their Bloomreach stack, allowing for real-time responses within existing workflows. It also incorporated dynamic price thresholds to protect margin and increase incrementality. Ensuring that incentives matched both user behaviour and commercial goals.
The Impact
Without Intent, discounts were applied generically or not at all, forcing the team to choose between lost conversions or lost margin.
With Intent, Better Bathrooms offered context-aware discounts only when real-time signals showed a likely abandonment, increasing relevance while preserving profitability.
Key Result: A 25.6% increase in conversion rate
By shifting from fixed rules to real-time responsiveness, Better Bathrooms reduced PDP abandonment without defaulting to mass discounts. This Play proved that timing and targeting matter as much as the incentive itself.
While this execution was focused on abandonment within product pages, the results have opened the door for wider experimentation with discount logic. The team are exploring new applications across the journey where margin can be protected without suppressing performance.
For brands navigating the balance between performance and profitability, smarter discounting is a competitive edge. This Play shows how real-time intent transforms discounting from a risk into a revenue lever, and why a more strategic approach can start with just one segment.
Want to stop discounting blindly? Explore more about Discounting with Intent.
