Discount
Communication

150+ campaign combinations. One broken experience.

By 2022, Bolt Food's discount system had grown into something users consistently found confusing and overwhelming. Every surface — home screen, provider page, menu, basket, checkout — was showing its own version of discount information, often using different visual languages, icons, colour codes, and copy patterns.

The core issue wasn't any single screen. It was the absence of a strategy. Discounts had been added reactively, each campaign type bolted on independently, until the system collapsed under its own complexity.

Three documented problems

• Cognitive overload. Delivery discounts were applied to most providers simultaneously. Combined with surge pricing, the home screen displayed so many competing signals that users couldn't identify which deal was relevant to them.
• Not scalable. Each new campaign type required a unique UI solution. The system had no framework for displaying multiple campaigns in the same space — leading to visual chaos and expensive engineering work per feature.
• Conditional campaigns were confusing. Users couldn't distinguish conditional discounts (spend X to get Y) from unconditional ones. Support tickets about discount confusion were rising. The copy and UI for conditions like "minimum basket size" or "capped savings" were frequently misunderstood.

Explicitness by journey stage

The first design decision was the most important: not all discount information needs to be visible at all times. The right level of detail depends on where the user is in their journey. Showing everything everywhere was the root cause of the overload — so the strategy was built around a staged explicitness model.

Visual hierarchy — what shows first

Menu discounts were placed at the top of the priority stack. An unconditional 20% off the menu is more valuable and more understandable than a conditional free delivery. The hierarchy was formalised and implemented consistently across home, search, and groceries surfaces:

• Menu discount (full menu, unconditional) → highest priority
• Menu discount (selected items, unconditional)
• Menu discount (conditional — basket size threshold)
• Delivery discount (unconditional)
• Delivery discount (conditional) → lowest priority

Testing three variants across surge, delivery, and basket communication

The strategy was validated through a structured programme of A/B tests — three primary experiments testing how and when to show discount and surge information, and how to communicate conditional campaigns without hurting conversion.

Test 1 — Surge communication

Surge indicators were applied to most providers simultaneously, creating noise rather than signal. Three variants were tested against the baseline:

Test 2 — Conditional delivery discount display

The main question: show the conditional price upfront, or protect conversion by revealing conditions progressively?

Test 3 — Basket progress bar visibility

Previously the "spend more to unlock discount" progress bar only appeared after the first item was added. Testing earlier visibility:

When "up to X" needs to be honest

Capped discounts — campaigns where the maximum saving is limited (e.g. "15% off, up to €5") — introduced a new communication challenge. The original system had no way to distinguish a capped campaign from an uncapped one. Users who expected to save a large amount were seeing smaller discounts applied at checkout, with no upfront explanation.

The cap-reached state

Once a user's basket hit the cap threshold, the progress bar needed a clear "you've got the maximum" state. This was the first introduction of a multi-stage progress bar: the bar fills through different thresholds sequentially, with a 2-second celebration animation at each milestone and a permanent "achieved" state at the final threshold.

Surfacing discounts that depend on how you pay

Payment method campaigns — discounts unlocked by paying with a specific card, bank, or wallet — were among the hardest to communicate because the discount is conditional on an action users take at the very end of the checkout flow. If they don't know the discount exists before they've built their basket, they may never use the qualifying payment method.

The design challenge was where to surface this: too early and it's irrelevant, too late and it's too pressured. The solution was a new checkout section — a payment method suggestion block that appeared in the basket only when a qualifying method was available for the current basket value, positioned above the payment selector.

A/B test — basket position

Variant B shipped as default. The contextual timing — showing the suggestion precisely where the user is about to make a payment decision — outperformed both earlier and more subtle placements.

Showing Plus discounts without disrupting the menu

When Bolt Plus menu discounts launched, the existing discount communication system couldn't handle a new type of campaign that was applied conditionally — only for subscribers — and needed to be visible at item level across the entire menu simultaneously. Showing green strikethrough prices on every item with a Bolt Plus discount created a visual overwhelm that conflicted directly with the cognitive load reduction work done in 2022.

The design brief: make Bolt Plus discounts clearly visible and motivating for subscribers, without creating noise for non-subscribers. The solution separated the communication by subscription state.

Checkout — Plus saving shown in receipt section

Menu discount composite — subscriber view

A/B tests — Plus visibility at checkout

For non-subscribers, a separate upsell test at the checkout level was run (covered in the Bolt Plus Subscription case study), which produced a +13.1% subscription conversion lift. The key insight from the Plus discount communication work: for subscribers, the discount must be felt through price, not messaging.

When multiple campaigns apply — making it legible

Stacked discounts — multiple campaign types applying simultaneously to a single order — were the most technically and visually complex challenge in the campaign communication work. A user might simultaneously have a menu discount, a delivery discount, a Bolt Plus saving, and a payment method discount all active at once. Each had been designed independently, with no framework for co-existence.

The stacked discounts work, which required 8 man-weeks of design effort alone, rebuilt the checkout receipt section from first principles to handle any combination of discount types without ambiguity.

The stacking problem

• Different campaign types used inconsistent visual treatments — different icons, colours, copy patterns
• No clear order of presentation — users couldn't tell which discount came from where
• Multiple strikethrough prices in the item list created a cluttered, hard-to-read visual
• The total discount line aggregated everything into one number — users couldn't audit their savings

The solution — a unified discount receipt architecture

The checkout receipt was redesigned to show a structured savings breakdown. Instead of multiple independent lines, all discounts are grouped under a single expandable "Discounts" section with individual lines per campaign type inside. The collapsed state shows the total saving; expanded shows the breakdown. This worked regardless of how many campaigns were active.

A/B tests — stacked discount display at checkout

150+ combinations — the system needs a reset

Three years of iterative improvements resolved the worst of the original problems, but the underlying complexity remained. By 2025, the audit showed 150+ distinct campaign combination types, each maintained separately. Each new campaign type still required weeks of design work. The premium feel of the experience was consistently being traded off against the need to surface one more type of offer.

The 2025 "Campaigns Communication — Problems and Opportunities" initiative — also written by this team — set out to address this at a higher level: not just how discounts are communicated, but whether the system that generates them can be simplified enough to allow a genuinely premium design.

What three years of discount design teaches you