In response to:

I was thinking about this, @Joeyjhung and I've done them before. they work!

I got a friend doing them at his coffee shop too. (they were previously just sitting on the counter at his shop. NOT MOVING!)

For his, we'd ask them, after they ordered but before they paid, if they'd like to add on a $10 gift card for $5 that they could gift to a friend (50% discount ONLY if they were buying as a gift)

so they would pay for their order and we'd get an instant $5 bump (which is most of the time doubling or tripling the order value!) + a referral to someone outside of our market!

after they said yes to this, we'd ask if they'd like to pay it forward for the next guest or for another friend getting a $10 gift card for $10. (they had already made a small commitment, why not a bigger one?)

from there, we did a pay-it-forward kina deal where, "Hey, the person before you bought you a $10 gift card, would you like it?"

then we'd start the cycle again.

there are risks of course but incredibly negligible.

the biggest risk is people saying "no" and turning away to buy somewhere else... not likely though



risks can be limited by the following:

- Don't have to offer it to everyone (regulars might get a different deal)

- scale up/down the gift card value

- scale up/down the items the card can be used on

- scale up/down the % discount (instead of a $10 card for $5 aka 50% do a 25% discount)

- I would swing towards a larger discount though bc those gift card are more likely to sell and - like you said - they're rarely redeemed


​​I'd love to say I was the creative one behind this idea but it's one I borrowed and modified from something I learned from @RealJayAbraham