Online Couponing Continues To Gain Momentum With Toys "R" Us Joining On In

It seems like the exception at this point, where I go through an entire day WITHOUT the mention of couponing in some form or another.  It’s just that hot of a topic in the retail world. Whether its mobile couponing (like Coupious or Yowza or Cellfire or Coupon Sherpa) or digital paperless couponing (like Zavers or Zing) or print to redeem couponing (Coupons.com) or in-store shopping assistants (Modiv Media) or many, many others there is just so many choices.

With all of this buzz and the many possible manifestations that coupons are taking in the digital world, the ShopLocal team really found the below research from comScore particularly useful in trying to figure out which direction to go when offering guidance to our retailer clients. Basically if one believes that changing consumer behaviors is really hard if not impossible, or if it is possible takes a really long time, then inserting “clippable” or printable coupons withing the online weekly ad sites is the most natural fit.  People are already doing this activity in the off line world, that transferring this activity should be a very natural fit (just as reading online newspaper ads / circulars has been a really great fit)

Note the leading response consumer gave in regards to the source of where they look to get coupons were the Sunday fliers (eg the weekly ads or circulars - all synonymous terms. This puts the SmartCircular sites that ShopLocal builds and hosts at the perfect sweet spot!

So aimed with this knowledge, Toys “R” Us is the latest retailer to begin to use it’s online “Sunday Flier” site as the consumer source for in-store promotional coupons as a tactic to drive increased in-store foot traffic and sales. As a nice fringe benefit, coupons do offer some level of web – to – store measurement.

So the ShopLocal team recently released a very simple and straight forward method of connecting the online circular content to a easily printed version of the coupons.

This is a circular browse page within the online Toys"R"Us weekly ad site. Note the coupon offer of "15% OFF" in the top left hand corner of the this back cover circular page.

Once a user clicks on the image of the coupon within the online SmartCircular site, the user's machine opens up a HiRes Adobe PDF version of the coupons that can easily be printed, saved and shared.