Coupons.com, which offers members digital discount offers via Web and mobile phone, has expanded its platform with a new portfolio of services, including the ability to save discount offers to selected retailer loyalty cards, the company announced today.
The Mountain View CA-based company also unveiled enhancements to its popular Grocery IQ shopping list app for the iPhone, as well as an iPhone app version of its Coupons.com Web site and a new optimization of the site for other feature phones.
The new “Save to Card” function will allow users to register their active loyalty cards for such retail grocery and drug chains as Safeway, Vons, Dominick’s, Genvardi’s and others in their Coupons.com profile page. They can then browse available coupons on the Web site either via a PC or a mobile device, looking under the “Savings Card” tab to find discount offers for which their cards are eligible and selecting those they want added to their cards.
When user swipe those loaded cards at the checkout, the discounts are automatically applied to the eligible purchases, eliminating the need to present paper coupons or the market’s need to clear them.
Coupons.com founder and CEO Steven Boal said integrating digital coupons with loyalty cards is the most practical solution to enabling downloadable discounts in busy stores where consumers often have multiple purchases eligible for discounts.
“We’ve seen the [couponing] industry flirt with all things of digital format for some time, all the way from the absurd—the notion of presenting barcodes on phones in high-volume checkout lanes—to the legitimate and tested, including digital loading onto loyalty cards,” he said in an interview.
One problem that needed to be solved in offering loyalty-card delivery of coupons was that of “stacking”, Boal said. That can occur when a manufacturer releases a coupon in two venues, to loyalty card members and then in a free-standing print insert, but wants to prevent users from overlaying one coupon over the other and thus getting a double discount.
“We’ve solved for that problem over our entire enterprise, so that when consumers choose one method of delivery for a particular offer, the other becomes unavailable to them.” The solution only works within the Coupons.com network of print, mobile and digital channels, Boal points out. Manufacturers who make deals with multiple coupon vendors will still face stacking issues.
Coupons.com has also released version 2.0 of the popular Grocery IQ iPhone paid app, which it acquired for an undisclosed sum from publisher Free State Labs in January 2009. The new version of the shopping-list app lets Couponc.som registrants browse available coupons from within the app and add items to their grocery lists simply by selecting the offers. When discounts are available from Coupons.com for items already on users’ lists, they are alerted to the savings.
Grocery IQ has been at the top of iTunes App Store’s list of paid lifestyle apps almost since its release, and the version adds some interesting functions. For example, users can create shopping lists simply by using their camera phones to snap the bar code on an item and then sending that information to the application. That saves the need to key in the name of the item, although the app is also able to autofill the name and sizes of more than 1 million products in compiling a list using a phone keyboard.
If two users choose to synchronize their GroceryIQ 2.0 shopping lists, a user at home can add an item to the list and have it automatically appear on the phone of a second user.
The company has also released a Coupons.com app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch device so users without the GroceryIQ app can also use their smartphones to browse and save digital coupons to their accounts or loyalty cards. Both iPhone apps also allow users to send links to their e-mail accounts or to print out coupons wireless over HP printers.
The iPhone Coupons.com app is free, while the price of the 2.0 version of the GroceryIQ iPhone app will remain at 99 cents on the iTunes Store. Why charge for the latter applications? “We really never considered changing that,” Boal says. “We feel it pays for itself very quickly.”
Future versions of the apps will provide access on other smartphones such as the RIM Blackberry and those built on Google’s Android platform. The Android version should be ready by the end of this year, Boal said.
Meanwhile, the company says it has optimized its main Coupons.com site to be easily accessed and navigated over regular feature phones and other Web-enabled devices, which can’t download software apps the way smartphones can. Users can browse the offers available in their registered areas, select those they want to redeem, and send message to their regular e-mail accounts containing links to the Coupons.com site, where they can then print out the coupons.
Finally, Coupons.com has added a “Show & Save” function that lets mobile users save selected electronic coupons directly on their mobile devices and simply show them at checkout to redeem their savings.
Most of these coupons involve discounts for restaurants, service providers and retailers where consumers usually offer one payment to a cashier, since calling up and then presenting multiple coupons on a device could slow checkout lines intolerably.
“Mobile presentment has been a technology looking for a use,” Boal said. “Where it works best is in low-volume, high-margin transactions—consumer electronics and things like that– and at the local level. We have over 12,000 offers with restaurants, dry cleaners and professional services, and phone presentment works very well there.”
But mobile presentment at high-volume, multiple-item retailers is several years away, according to Boal. Apart from line delays, the tactic raises problems of phones damaged by cashiers or left behind by absent-minded shoppers.
For those reasons, while Coupons.com is working with partners to research mobile couponing solutions involving near-field communications and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on shelved products, Boal doesn’t expect that shoppers in supermarkets or mass retailers will be able to present coupons straight from their mobile devices any time soon.
“It’s all about moving people quickly through those checkout lines,” he says. “Searching for multiple coupons on your phone, then showing each one, perhaps dropping your phone in the process—those are not conducive to speed.”
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