Coupons, Inc. has bought a patent from the American Consulting Co. enabling it to deepen its footprint in the online coupon industry.
The patent is titled “Electronic coupon distribution,” and is commonly referred to as the “Engel Patent.” Purchased last month, it covers any online distribution system that allows consumers to search or view product coupons and print them from their computers.
Clients of the Mountain View, CA-based company use Coupons’ online platform to place coupons on their individual Web sites. The coupons are then printed and redeemed by consumers, said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.
“It [the patent] allows us to impress upon others that…this intellectual property is owned by us and stakes out a boundary for our secure delivery platform for coupons,” Boal said.
The service also lets clients gather consumer data for marketing purposes and uniquely encodes coupons to prevent unauthorized duplication, a challenge faced by the $6 billion industry, he said.
Now that the company officially owns the patent, it is going after others who may be infringing upon it.
“Our attorneys are in the middle of industry analysis,” Boal said. “There are only a handful of proprietary delivery types but none of them are at [our] scale or volume. That being said, it wasn’t cheap [to acquire the patent] so we plan to do a thorough analysis.”
Boal did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.
The company’s roster of clients includes Kimberly-Clark, S.C. Johnson and General Mills. The company was founded in 1998.
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