Coupon Clipping Service?

[jacquelynrose]

Anyone do this or have done it? I just found it on the web, I thought it was interesting...Any comments?

WHAT IT IS:

You find Coupons you want Online and then they send them to you...

Jacquelyn

[getforfree]

Try ebay for that. But I woudln't want to pay anybody more than $1 for that service. I don't want even spend $1 on Sunday paper, I just go to some small local stores, whose owners I know, and ask them for the coupons from the paper. Usually they are ok with that. If they don't sell the paper, they can return it for a credit, doesn't matter if all the adds and stuff is there.

[dshep]

My mother uses one that is based in NewJersey.... she uses it maybe every two or three months... She just orders online and boom they are mailed to her...its her way of getting just the coupons she needs. And that is the only reason she uses it.
She does get lots of "free" coupons from papers in her area (CT). She is also one of those people that can walk into the store, spend 60 dollars in grocerys and the store ends up owing her. It would make sense to use one if you are in a place that gets no coupons, or no "good" coupons.

[StressLess]

On ebay, you often have to buy them in a batch of 20, 10 if you're lucky. In a two-person household I can't use that many for most items. OTOH, I can use multiples on things like cat and dog food and can't get enough from the newspapers--even though I subscribe to two. They also offer rebate forms, winetags, and such that you might never see otherwise. Like dshep's mom, I use it maybe every two months.

[flash]

Jeffrey has an article on the main site about the risks of this.

A friendly reminder to all...purchasing coupons is ILLEGAL, as is selling them. There are loop holes around this, but discussions of PURCHASING coupons are discouraged here.

[StressLess]

Flash, which article of Jeffrey's are you referring to? I did a search and came up with several. So far I haven't found one where he was saying coupon clipping services were carrying out illegal activity or saying not to talk about them. In fact, he has an article up called Couponing 101 by a Kim Rowley, which mentions coupon services. And he has a reply to that article talking about using Ebay for coupons, where he doesn't seem to have any qualms about it at all.

I'd be curious what law this falls under. See the 10th paragraph down in this article from the grocery industry point of view. http://promomagazine.com/othertactic...coupon_crimes/

"Pressured by retailers and manufacturers, two major auction sites have changed their coupon policies. In October, Yahoo banned coupon sales. That increased pressure on eBay, as the Grocery Manufacturers of America and the Food Marketing Institute called on the site to follow Yahoo's example. In January, eBay bowed part way with a new policy banning the sale of expired or electronically delivered coupons. Its new rules also limit bulk sales and sales of free product and home-printed coupons. “Ideally, we would have liked for coupon auctions to be taken off totally, based on the argument that coupons are non-transferable intellectual property owned by the manufacturer, but we understand eBay's position,” says Karin Kroft, GMA's senior director of industry affairs. The GMA and other industry groups are working to make sure the policy results in real reform. The groups now scour the site for offending offerings and notify eBay when they find one."

If coupon auctions on Ebay are truly illegal, why wasn't the industry able to get Ebay to close down all of them? Why wasn't a law cited, instead of an "argument" made by the GMA?

From what I've read, the main coupon fraud problem the industry has is stores (or fake stores) turning in tons of coupons for products that were never bought. I don't think any of us are trying to do that. And if it's just that the companies don't want us using more than one or two coupons for a product, why is trading them any more legitimate than using a coupon service?

[Dixiechick]

I've used The Coupon Master to get alot of $1.00 coupons. Especially since our coupon inserts rarelly have $1.00 face values. Other regions do, so I'll go for those. I'll buy about 5 of each item I need/want usually. Minimum order is $3 plus shipping, but I use enough or most times all the ones I buy to compensate for the total amount I spend on them. They also usually arrive within 3-4 days for me. Enough time to get them for the latest grocery/drug store deals...

Most sites will specify that you are paying for their time to gather and clip the coupon, and you're not really buying the coupon per se...a matter of how they word it. I guess that's what keeps them "legal". It's a service for items that I usually don't have in my Sunday inserts.

Dixiechick