Discount vs. Bonus: What’s The Difference? Does it Matter?

3 min readOct 7, 2018

First of all: bonuses and discounts aren’t the same but their aim is similar: they create favourable conditions for investors. It does matter whether you use the term bonus or discount. Let me run you through those terms.

Below are their definitions:

Bonus: something in addition to what is expected or strictly due.
Discount: a reduction made from the gross¹ amount or value of something.
¹Gross: consisting of an overall total exclusive of deductions.

Quick introspection in consumer psychology

This difference is the main point — why it psychologically matters, whether you use bonus or discount to describe profitable conditions of a deal. Studies have shown consumers prefer more profits over less losses.

“The authors identify a tendency among consumers to neglect base values when processing percentage change information and investigate the implications of such base value neglect for how consumers evaluate economically equivalent offers presented in percentage terms, such as bonus packs and price discounts.” — Chen, Marmorstein, Tsiros, Rao

Our judgement is mostly based on perception; when one has to pick a 100% bonus or a 50% discount, a majority will pick 100% bonus because perception is that 100% is “more” than 50% since 100 is a larger number than 50. Additionally, discount is convey a negative sentiment.

Generally speaking, this indicates you should always offer a bonus, when marketing a trade to the masses.
It might be something different, when talking to other business individuals, as they might prefer to know what would be the price difference they pay.

Bonus vs Discount in the ICO space

In the context of ICOs, differences between bonus and discount goes even further.

Discounts are always applied directly: the price to which you purchase tokens is reduced when you take part in the token sale. You receive all your tokens at once.
Bonuses are often applied afterwards: typically, you purchase tokens at a given price and receive bonus tokens in the following months once the main sale has ended.

The current standard in the ICO space is to use bonuses. The reason for this is that it prevents token holders to sell these coins.

Note: take a read at Token Supply 101 i f you are not clear with token terminology and policies and to understand the implications of issuing high supply of tokens at once.

Why confusion if there are

Easiest answer might be because people don’t know they’re different. Way to often I had to explain investors bonus isn’t the same as discount — and what they mean exactly.

Something that should be common sense, wasn’t.