Target Printables to Continue, Despite Coupon Network Shutdown

Yesterday’s news that Catalina Marketing is planning to shut down its CouponNetwork.com printable coupon site left many Target fans fretting. No sooner did the news sink in, than they realized – wait, doesn’t Catalina also run Target’s printable coupon site? So will this mean the end of printable Target coupons??

It’s too soon to know exactly what Target’s printable coupon site will look like, once Catalina gets out of the printable coupon business after December 11th. But Target wants couponers and customers to know that its printable coupons are here to stay.

“We do not anticipate any guest-facing changes to our online coupon portal and look forward to continuing to offer our guests a wide variety of compelling coupon offers on Target.com/coupons,” Target spokesperson Molly Snyder told Coupons in the News. Similarly, Coupon Network offered a brief reassurance on its Facebook page, that “Target.com will not be affected by the CouponNetwork.com changes.”

Neither Target nor Catalina would comment on the nature of their business relationship, and whether they’ll continue to work together in some form, or whether Target will be looking for a new vendor to operate its printable coupons. Presumably at least a few things about Target’s printable coupon offerings will change, since the site also hosts manufacturer’s coupons, most of which are also on CouponNetwork.com. Once Coupon Network goes away, it may be safe to assume those manufacturer’s coupons will go away too.

Already, there’s been at least one subtle change. The unique ID codes that began appearing on Target printable coupons earlier this year, appear to have vanished.

Even if Target does end up changing coupon vendors, it may not be much of a worry – since it’s happened before.

Nearly a decade ago, Target coupons were available to print right from the store’s website without any security protections or print limits. You could print them as is, right off the screen, as many times as you wanted. In 2009, Target began working with the printable coupon company E-centives, which imposed print limits via a coupon printing applet that users had to install. A year later, Target found itself working with Catalina, when that company acquired E-centives. And now Target’s relationship with Catalina itself may be ending.

Even before the news about Coupon Network, the Target coupon site had been pretty quiet. Whereas once there were a slew of new coupons available each and every Sunday, this month there have been just a few scattered new additions each week. A bunch of Target printable store coupons are set to expire on November 9th, so keep an eye on the Target coupon site this weekend and next – if those expired coupons are replenished with new ones, all may be well with the world. If the offers are unchanged, or we just get new expiration dates for the same old coupons, the promise of no “guest-facing changes” may turn out to be more literal than we thought.

(Update: a couple dozen Target coupons for toys showed up on the site on Wednesday – so things are looking up already…)