Are you encouraging fake coupon sites?

It can be a shock for online retailers to see a whole list of sites claiming to offer coupons for their online shop when they search for myshopname coupon. “Why do they do it?”, they ask. “It’s not as though I offer coupons.”

Yet, many of these merchants are unintentionally doing two things to encourage the practice. Are you?

Are you encouraging the customers to search for a coupon before buying?
Most shopping carts include a box to ask for coupons during the payment process. These carts were designed by technical people, not retailers. Would you interrupt a real life sales process by introducing the idea that they might get a discount to a customer? Or would you leave it to them to bring up the subject of discounts or coupons if they have one? This is even more pertinent on the internet because when your salesperson (ie your website) helpfully says: do you have one of our discount coupons, all the customer has to do is open a new window and search for yourshopname coupons and up they come. Customer finds the coupon (often non-existent, out of date or intended for other purposes) then completes the sale.You can’t blame the customer for this one, your website made the suggestion. You could even say that it is training the customer to expect a discount from you.

Are you providing a financial incentive to these coupon sites to list you.
No, why would you? Well, if you have an affiliate program, and you allow these sites to join, you are providing them with all the incentive they need - commission on every sale you make where the customer tries the quick search just in case they find a coupon. The purpose of these sites is purely to get in the line-of-fire and get their cookie on your customer’s computer. It doesn’t matter to them what effect it has on your brand, or if your customers are feeling let down after being told there might be a coupon but now there isn’t. No skin off their nose.

So how do you stop it? Here are some steps…

1. Consider how discount coupons fit into your branding.
2. Restrict your affiliate program to affiliates who only offer genuine, authorised coupons or special deals.
3. Get rid of the coupon request on your site if you don’t offer coupons.
4. If you do use coupons, consider a name change - referrer code, valued customer code, etc. These can do the same job as coupons but give a completely different impression.
5. If you use coupons to track the effectiveness of advertising, use additional tracking methods to ensure that the customer actually comes from that source.
6. Consider value add rather than discount strategies.