10 Limited-Time Offer Examples + Templates to Help You Craft Yours

In this post, we’ll show you 10 examples of how ecommerce brands use urgency and scarcity to drive sales. Plus, we’ll provide templates that will help you promote your own limited-time offer.

Limited-time offer captions you can use

Limited-time offers outperform regular promotions because they play into human psychology — our fear of missing out (FOMO) and the desire for exclusivity.

Based on these principles, limited-time offer wording usually features phrases that emphasize urgency and scarcity.

Time restriction

These phrases highlight a limited window of opportunity, compelling shoppers to act immediately:

• “Today only!”
• “Valid through midnight!”
• “Ends tomorrow!”
• “Last day to save!”
• “48-hour sale!”
• “Exclusive weekend sale — ends Sunday!”
• “Limited-time deal: 25% off sitewide!”

Time-based phrases work especially well in promotions tied to specific events, like flash sales or seasonal campaigns.

Supply restriction

These phrases emphasize scarcity, triggering FOMO and pushing hesitant shoppers to act:

• “While supplies last!”
• “Limited quantities available!”
• “Get it before it’s gone!”
• “Only X left in stock!”
• “Hurry — selling out fast!”
• “Shop now — items going fast!”

Supply-focused wording is most effective for physical products or high-demand items, as it creates an urgency tied to availability.

Depending on your business niche, you can use either of these or even both. For instance, Black Friday is one of those days when both types of restrictions are relevant due to the huge volume of sales happening in 24 hours.

But it’s not just the wording you can play with when crafting a limited-time offer. You can also use different approaches and add variety to your promo campaigns.

Here are 6 limited-time offer examples you’ll read about below:

1. Countdown timer
2. Category sale
3. Sitewide sale
4. Flash sale
5. Seasonal clearance
6. First-time purchase

We’re going to provide examples for each category and break them down to see why each tactic works.

1. Limited-time offers paired with a countdown timer

As the name suggests, these offers include a countdown timer to emphasize urgency and encourage immediate action.

Countdown timers can be added to specific website pages, pop-up promos, and promotional emails.

Let’s see some examples in action.

Home Glow Australia effectively uses a countdown timer on its website during a Black Friday promotion. The timer is prominently displayed on the home page, showing the exact days, hours, minutes, and seconds left before the sale ends.

Combined with the phrase “Limited Time Only & While Stocks Last!”, the timer creates a strong sense of urgency, nudging visitors to act quickly.

💡 You can recreate a timer like this one on your website, for free, using GSC Countdown Timer if you’re on Shopify or HurryTimer plugin if you’re on WordPress.

Blue Apron takes a different approach by adding a countdown timer to an exit-intent popup. When a visitor is about to leave their website, a message pops up offering $50 off their next two orders — but only if they claim the deal within 30 minutes.

This tactic combines urgency with a personal incentive, encouraging users to sign up on the spot.

Samsonite uses countdown timers in their promotional emails to highlight a limited-time holiday deal. The timer, displayed at the top of the email, immediately draws the recipient’s eye to the urgency of the promotion.

Phrases like “Limited Time Holiday Deal Event” and “Shop Now” reinforce the urgency, while the visual timer ensures customers don’t miss the deadline.

2. Limited-time sale for product category

If you have multiple product categories on your website and you want to promote specific product types, start a category sale.

Limited-time offers on selected categories are a great way to boost the slow-moving stock.

Let’s consider the Top Deals section of Bed Bath & Beyond, one of the biggest domestic merchandise stores.

There is a unique promo offer for each product category, all with a mix of urgency and scarcity. Some of them imply limited inventory, while others are valid for a short period of time. The idea is that these select top deals will get you the most value for your money if you make haste.

So, if you’re after these up to $120 off select vacuums, don’t dilly-dally too much because the offer may be gone any minute.

3. Sitewide sales

If promoting select categories is not relevant in your case, a limited-time sitewide sale might be a good idea. Here's Tobi, a fast-fashion retail store for women, announcing its 50% off sitewide deal.

Notice that their offer takes up the entire landing page — it’s literally the first thing you see when you open the website.

Sitewide promos help convert first-time visitors into customers, that’s why many brands activate remarketing campaigns during sales.

As an alternative to designing a new page, you can add a fullscreen website overlay or a sticky bar that will feature the details of the offer and help visitors navigate to the right page or copy the discount code for checkout.

This is how it looks on Tommy John’s website.

If you need a promo bar like this one for your next campaign, you can add the following one to your website for free, using Getsitecontrol website popup builder.

Just change the image, adjust the color theme, and edit the text of the offer – then publish the banner on your website following the prompts.

4. Flash sales

When you run a flash sale, you greatly drop prices on select products for a very short period of time.

Flash deals push visitors to impulse buy your products and help you sell your surplus stock.

Because a flash sale may last as little as a day, it’s important to use all communication channels to promote it. Your goal is to ensure all customers get a chance to take advantage of your offers.

If you have a list of emails or, better yet, phone numbers of your customers, that would be your go-to channel to promote your limited-time offer. Here are examples from Mixed by Nasrin and Milk Makeup, notifying customers about their flash sales via SMS.

Note how the wording of these messages implies that the product is in demand, and you have to be quick if you want to get it.

SMS marketing is quite efficient for promoting flash sales because customers tend to have a faster reaction to SMS than to emails. Its average open rate and click-through rate also tend to be higher. That said, a flash sale calls for an email newsletter, too. If you’re looking for inspiration, we have a detailed guide to crafting flash sale emails. Alternatively, you can get started with one of the email templates below.

5. Seasonal clearance

A seasonal clearance is a sale held only several times a year and anticipated by the customers. The difference between a flash sale and a seasonal sale is in the products that are participating in the promo. In the latter case, it’s typically the products that were most relevant in the season that has just passed or is about to end.

Let’s see how brands announce seasonal sales to drive their customers’ attention.

Faherty Brand, a clothing and lifestyle brand, promotes a winter sale with a floating bar at the top of the page that matches the website’s colors.

The clickable light-brown announcement bar at the top of the webpage is always in view and remains visible regardless of where you click on the website. And the copy, as simplistic and concise as it is, gives visitors a good idea of what to expect.

While an onsite banner works for store visitors, it’s crucial to ensure that your past customers and subscribers know about the event as well. To achieve that, you might want to craft an eye-catching promo email, like Little Rooms did in the example below.

Two things make this email particularly efficient. First, it highlights the important details about the sale at the very top: the discount percentage, the minimum order requirements, and the date when the sale ends. Second, in addition to the featured image, Little Rooms added product cards to spotlight the products that are most likely to pique the subscribers’ interest and encourage them to click through.

6. First-time purchase discount

Did you know that around 80% of shoppers feel positive about buying from a new brand when given a solid offer? In other words, a special discount targeting first-time shoppers may nudge them into becoming lifetime customers.

As a rule, it’s more difficult (and expensive) to sell something to newcomers rather than to your existing customers. So, using limited-time offers aimed exclusively at those who hear about your brand for the first time is a strategy worth trying.

Look at how Lola Blankets uses this tactic to encourage first-time visitors to sign up for a first-order discount.

The best part here?

The Lola Blankets team kills two birds with one stone. This limited-time offer popup appears a couple of seconds after a first-time visitor lands on their website, and it helps the company grow their email list, too.

As new shoppers become subscribers, the brand can maintain engagement by sending new offers and promotions via email.

Time to create your own limited-time offers

Now that you’ve read through 6 types of limited-time offers, learned what they’re good for and what makes each of them work, it’s time to recreate one of them on your website.

There is no need to create a dedicated landing page to announce a new promo. If you want to implement it quickly and without the help of a developer, Getsitecontrol is the tool for you.

Getsitecontrol is an app that helps you quickly add floating bars and popups to your website and use them to announce sales.

Interested, uh? Well then, without further ado, here are the steps to create your own limited-time offer popup.

Step 1. Create an account & install Getsitecontrol on your website

Before you can start creating your first popup, you’ll need to create an account on the platform. Once that is done, follow the steps in the instructions to install Getsitecontrol on your website.

Step 2. Choose a template

When you have completed the formalities, you can go ahead and choose a popup template from the gallery. Here is the template we’ll use as a base for this tutorial:

Choose a template that is similar to the result you’d like to get, but don’t stress too much about it: all the templates are fully customizable, so you’ll be able to achieve what you want anyway.

When you find a template you like, open it and hit the Take this template button to bring it to the Getsitecontrol dashboard for editing.

Step 3. Craft the copy & design of your offer

From the Design tab of the dashboard, you can edit the content of the template. Click the relevant section on the menu on the right to change its text:

If you want to add an extra field to your popup, click the + Add field button in the fields section and proceed to choose the field type. As you can see in the screenshot below, we’ve added a consent checkbox that allows our subscribers to give consent to receiving promotional material.

On the second page of the popup, you’ll reward your newly-acquired subscribers with the offer they signed up for. To do that, set up a button that will copy the coupon code for them, so that they can use it at checkout right away. Here’s how to do it:

Click the Page 2 button in the bottom-right corner of the screen to open the second page of the popup. Proceed to edit the copy by following the same steps you’ve just seen. When you get to the button, open its settings and remove the current Close widget action associated with it. Then, click the + Add action button and select Copy to clipboard from the menu:

When prompted, insert the coupon code you want customers to copy to the clipboard, and you’re all set!

Now that the content of the popup is ready, we can move on to its appearance, which is also a determining factor in the success of the offer.

The element that gets the most attention is the image, so choose it wisely. You can change the image by clicking on it in the preview. Then, browse the built-in gallery or upload an image from your device. If necessary, change the image settings to adjust how it fits in the popup:

Follow these steps for both pages of your popup.

Use the Theme section to further modify the design of your popup. From there, you can change the popup’s font, color palette, and style.

To check the appearance of your popup on mobile devices, switch to the mobile preview mode:

And that covers the content and appearance of the popup. Let’s move on to the Targeting tab to program its behavior.

Step 4. Set up targeting conditions for your popup

The Targeting tab is where you decide when and where the promo will pop up on your website.

As you can imagine, this is a crucial step for the success of your offer, so think carefully about where, when, and for how long you want people to see your popup.

Here are our suggestions for targeting settings for a limited-time offer popup.

Display your offer sitewide to ensure that your visitors will see it regardless of the page they’re on. To do that, simply keep the default settings of the page targeting ( Display widget on ):

Since ours is an offer for the first purchase, show your popup to new visitors only. You can do that in the Display widget if section by choosing Visit → New visitor:

Next, add a time condition to the Start displaying widget section to give your visitors a chance to look around before they see your offer:

People tend to dismiss popups without even looking at them if they see them too soon. This condition aims to prevent that.

Finally, we recommend programming the popup to stop displaying after a visitor has taken action (in our case, submitted the email form). In the Stop displaying widget section, click the + Add condition button and select Upon action. Then, remove the pre-set condition ( Stop displaying for 1 day after the user closed it ).

And that concludes our suggestions for targeting settings. Getsitecontrol allows for countless other targeting options, including the exit-intent trigger we mentioned above, so feel free to experiment to achieve different results.

When you are done, hit the Save & close button, proceed to activate the popup, and you are all set.

Make limited-time offers work for your store

Limited-time offers work because they create urgency, drive action, and inspire purchases. Whether you’re running flash sales, seasonal clearances, or exclusive discounts, the right messaging and design can make all the difference.

With tools like Getsitecontrol, creating and promoting these offers is quick and seamless. Start experimenting today and see how urgency can turn visitors into customers.