Why Printable Grocery Coupons Are Hard to Find

Each weekend, the newspaper hits the driveway with a “THUD”. Not so much from the weight of the content pages, but from the stack of sale papers wrapped inside.

Location-Based Pricing

The first concept is location-based commodity pricing. Retail chains have different prices for items from one geographic location to the next. For example, a grocery chain may have a $2 gallon of milk here in southeast Michigan where I live, and a $3.50 gallon in LA where my colleague, Karen lives. Of course, that affects coupons and sales.

So, collecting that data is a giant task. It’s not just “Target”, but “Target in each region”. You can see this in action by visiting a website like Target.com and clicking to view the store circular. The first thing it will ask you to do is type in your address so that it can show you the sale paper for your store.

Advertising Channels

The second concept is the retailer’s advertising channel. The coupons and deals that we collect come from the retailer’s affiliate marketing channel. These are the promotions that they give to online publishers to promote – in return, they give the publishers a cut of the purchases that are made by any of that publisher’s visitors.

When the sale activity happens offline, tracking isn’t as reliable. So, retailers can’t be sure that the publisher sent the shopper, and can’t give that publisher a cut, so that publisher is less incentivized to show more deals from that retailer.

In the affiliate marketing channel, most retailers and publishers try to keep things online so that it can be tracked and credited appropriately.

Typically, advertisers aren’t looking for their affiliate channels (or online publishers in general) to drive sales in their stores. Those sales are routed through their print advertising channels that create those circulars, their search marketing around hard-to-find items that are stocked in local stores and their in-store marketing channels.

Without the commission portion that affiliate marketing brings to the mix, publishers place less value on the content. Think about it – would you pay upwards of $1,000/month to have access to a datafeed of all of the deals that stores are running ‘in store’ if you wouldn’t make a dime off of sharing those deals? Probably not… and since you’re probably not, we (and others like us) are not inclined to create technology and spend thousands of hours a month aggregating this content.

What Printable Offers ARE Available Through a Datafeed?

All of that being said, there are merchants/retailers in our datafeed and tools that do offer printable coupons. Some of them pay on sales while others pay on the download and/or print of the coupon.

You can get a good idea of who we cover and the types of offers we have by signing up for a Deal Bank account – it is free and gives you access to our complete database of offers.

Create a Free Account Now