Found a great product online that you want to buy? Wish there were discount coupons to reduce the price? Well, there are, and plenty of websites now offer great coupon discounts.
The only problem is that the discount coupons may not be authorized by the online stores! Some coupon websites have put coupons there without any contact with the web retail stores for which they offer the discounts.
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They offer discount coupons primarily for small web retail stores, without the knowledge of the online retail store whose products are discounted. Giant stores and their online equivalents do not honor the coupons, but small web retail stores are put in a very difficult position.
Either small stores honor the discounts or risk the wrath of consumers who think the coupon is valid simply because they found it online, and become angered when they cannot use it.
Furthermore, these coupon websites are even created on the fly. Coupons on them are machine-generated dynamically, based on keywords entered as search terms into Google. There may not have been any human intervention to load and offer these coupons. Computer code gets your search terms from Google and creates discounts using the logos of websites returned from the consumer's search.
What Is The Problem, Anyway? Coupons Are Good Advertising!
The intense competition in the Internet marketplace has driven the price of goods way down. That is a good thing. That means that the sales margin (the difference between the sales price and the cost of the item before wages, site hosting fees, advertising, etc.) has also been driven way down, commensurately (usually below 15%; frequently 10%).
Small web stores have to compete with the big box stores of the world, so they must keep their margins extremely low.
One coupon for a 10% or 15% discount has just wiped out the entire profit margin for the small business. They may be able to afford to provide a discount to a few customers who purchase in bulk quantities, but if everyone were to purchase their products with coupons and discount codes, the business would not be sustainable.
What's in it for the Coupon Websites?
Why are fraudulent coupons available? How do these web sites make money?
If they can build significant traffic to their sites, advertisers will pay them to advertise on their sites. That translates to hundreds of dollars per day in revenue. They do not create any products, sell or ship any products, but they haul in tens of thousands of dollars (euros, pounds, whatever currency) per month.
What is the result?
Small businesses cannot afford to stay in business with no gross margin to pay employees and cover operating expenses. Either small companies will have to crank up the prices to cover these discounts or they will eventually have to close their "online doors."
That leaves entire online marketplace to the large companies. Small companies cannot afford to compete. Look at what happened to Main Street America when the super stores moved in.
If you are excited to find coupons online, consider calling the web retail store to find out if these coupons are authorized. If not valid, do understand that trashing the small online businesses on the Internet for not honoring the coupons only hurts all of us by leaving the entire playing field to the large monopoly companies.
Online Coupons - Are They Valid?
Mary Engle is a contributor and author for the website Futons and Beanbags
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