Alternative Ways To Coupons Clipping

Thanks to the recent economic downturn, coupon clipping is finding its way back to consumers who are looking to save. With consumables from dairy products to meat prices on the rise, savvy shoppers are expected to clip even more in the coming year. Even people who has never clipped a coupon in their lives are now checking out those circulars that came with the paper.

Retailers, e-commerce and manufacturers who now realized that coupons help create loyal and returning customers are rolling out new technologies and platforms that make coupons even more accessible and reachable to shoppers. Supermarket chain Kroger f or example, offers a platform that enable shopping consumers to load coupons onto their cellphones, or link them to their store loyalty card.

Let us check out the various alternative ways shoppers and online consumers can take advantage of coupons both online and offline — and none of them require a pair of scissors.

Cellphone Coupons
The next big thing in coupons: cellphones. According to Juniper Research, a U.K.-based market researcher, marketers expect mobile coupons to generate $7 billion annually by 2011. Saving money has never been easier, the coupons get delivered straight to the subscriber’s mobile phone via text message or mobile web application. Among the services that offer this kind of technology are Cellfire.com and MyCoupster.com, they bring you savings from your favorite restaurants and local entertainment – to everything in between. You don’t have to be a technical wiz to take advantage of the technology and best of all, these services are free of charge (Message & Data rates may apply).

Coupon Kiosks
Forget about circulars or the Sunday newspaper, shoppers are now able to print their own coupons inside various stores. CVS, Marsh Supermarkets and Giant Eagle stores provide shoppers who can swipe their respective loyalty card at an in-store kiosk and receive their coupons based on purchase history and current store specials. Stop & Shop provide shopping carts which are equipped with mini-computers that tally purchases and offer coupons.

Loyalty Cards
People don’t want to take the time to clip the coupons, remember to take them to the store and then, once there, remember to use them. AOL’s Shortcuts.com seeks to streamline the process, it is a free electronic grocery coupon service that links coupons to the shopper’s participating grocery store savings card. Once coupons are selected from the website, they are added to the shopper’s registered grocery store savings card and are redeemed automatically at checkout when they scan their card. This way there is no need to clip and no paper to take to the store. Loyalty marketing firm, Chockstone created a similar technology that enable shoppers to load participating retailers’ loyalty club information onto a credit card. In this way, shoppers’ reward points and discounts automatically get applied during checkout.

Shopping Widgets
A new kind of online “Mealbox” widget from grocery and consumer products retail chain Meijer Inc. which lets consumers create shopping lists of grocery items on their desktop or webpage, is driving up the use of online coupons redeemed in stores. As a user creates a shopping list, any available coupons are automatically attached to the list with bar codes that can be printed out and redeemed in a store. Shoppers have many options in where to access the widget, which can be copied from Meijer.com or MLive.com for placement on a personalized iGoogle page, a personalized page on Facebook.com, or a shopper’s own blog. In addition to building shopping lists with coupons, the Mealbox widget includes features for e-mailing content to friends or forwarding to social networking sites such as Del.icio.us, Twitter.com and StumbleUpon.com.

Web Coupons
The pitfall of web-based coupons has long been in-store acceptance. For retailers, it was hard enough to tell the real thing from a fake because there were no barcodes or other authentication measures in place. Now sites like Coupons.com and SmartSource.com use barcode-printing software that helps remedy that problem, shoppers can easily click on the coupons they like and print them out without too much concern about whether the store will accept them. Just be aware that retailers typically limit shoppers to just two printouts per coupon.

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