Coupon Sites: Choose Your Partners Wisely

Connie Berg recently wrote about how some merchants won’t work with any coupon sites.

I often write that merchants and networks need to pick their partners (yes, affiliates should be considered partners to both merchants and networks) more carefully. Many sites that have coupons, such as Flamingo World, have a simple database function to automatically turn coupons on and off on days designated by merchants.

There are other sites that post coupons without a care about expiration dates.

Then there is the worst group, those that purposely post expired coupons. For whatever reasons they give, this is a horrible practice for everyone except customers who want to scream knowing that customer service will let them use the expired coupon. These sites give the rest of us a bad name.

eDealInfo justifies it as follows:

Recently Expired Coupons:

We have now started to maintain list of recently expired coupons because of 2 main reasons. First reason is that we sometimes get enquiry about already expired coupons from the visitors. Secondly sometimes it happens that even if the coupon has been stated to expire on certain date, it does not actually get pulled off from the merchant’s system. In that case you may still be able to get the discount!

Take a look at some examples:

Gap
JC Penney [Note: JC Penney used to have an exclusive program.]

Dell

B hoth of there sites hide their identity in Whois. I wonder why.

About David Lewis

David Lewis is the CEO and founder of 77Blue which operates online shopping websites. Prior to that, he worked in business development at GoTo / Overture. David was a product manager and accountant in past lives. In 2006, David won Commission Junction’s Horizon Award for Innovation and was a finalist for Linkshare’s Golden Link Award. You can find David on Twitter @thedavidlewis.

Website: http://davidlew.is

Twitter: thedavidlewis