Paperless Coupons
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Posted in: Standards
Coupons Go Paperless… For Now
A fellow named Greg Grunberg has written an iPhone app that allows the user to post coupons on their phone, so they can be scanned at the register.See http://www.digtriad.com/news/watercooler/article.aspx?storyid=122585&catid=176
It remains to be seen whether retailers and their coupon processors will embrace this new technology, because it not only makes the propagation of coupons virtually unlimited and uncontrollable, it also makes it ever more possible and easier to propagate fraudulent coupons. And this is a huge concern in retailing.
Coupon fraud is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States alone. Making it even easier is not what retailers would consider to be progress.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for whatever drives the retail channel, and I think Mr. Gruenberg’s app is brilliant. It opens a whole new avenue and helps pretty much everybody from the consumer to the retailer. But it can also become another hole in the dike in an industry that isn’t already doing a great job on a number of fronts.
The issue of fraud is one very alarming and expensive example. Another is the huge (and virtually incalculable) problem of coupon errors.
Like fines and penalties from poorly performing barcodes, which are quickly and completely concealed from the general population for reasons of public embarrassment and possible damage to the business, mistakes made in coupon offers are just as quickly and effectively covered up—and for the same reason. They can (and do) cost major retailers millions if not billions of dollars, they are a huge embarrassment and they reflect badly on how those companies are run.
Just imaging how rapidly a coupon that mistakenly offers more than it was intended can spread if its circulation is not longer limited to a particular campaign in a particular newspaper or magazine. Just imagine how easily and broadly such a coupon could spread through emails, text messages and other means of electronic communications.
A mistake like that could conceivably bring a company to its knees—or worse.
