Target Coupons: New & Improved, Or “A Hot Mess”?

If you haven’t checked out Target’s printable coupon site lately, you may want to take a look around. Printable store coupons are now easier to print, but harder to find. There are many more store coupons to choose from, but there are also many more manufacturer coupons that you can find on any number of other printable coupon sites.

In short, the site is new and improved – but also sort of annoying.

The main change is that Target has finally moved on from the Catalina Savings Printer. Catalina itself stopped using the printing applet a year and a half ago, when it closed down its Coupon Network printable coupon site. At the time, Target said its own printable coupons would be unaffected by Catalina’s move. And that remained true – until last week, when Target made the switch to having its coupons powered by Coupons.com instead.

That makes for a better printing experience, for most who had trouble with the Catalina printer and had no one to turn to for support. But it also means that Target’s printable coupon page is now populated by hundreds of Coupons.com offers – the same ones available on other Coupons.com affiliate sites, as well as Coupons.com itself. So if you get your allotted two coupon prints from one site, you can’t print them from any other.

And hiding among all those Coupons.com coupons, somewhere in there, are what many couponers are really seeking out – Target store coupons.

The good news is that there are many more store coupons to choose from. More than two dozen new ones appeared this past Sunday. Store coupons appear to be getting replenished more often, which is reassuring to those who worried that the presence of fewer and fewer available offers was a sign that the store’s printable coupon site was winding down.

Of course, back in the day, the Target coupon site was mostly store coupons, with the occasional manufacturer’s coupon mixed in. Today, it’s the opposite. And that has some Target printable coupon fans frustrated. “The new website coupon page setup is terrible!” one commenter wrote on Target’s Facebook page. “This is not progress nor an improvement,” another wrote. “Their site is now a hot mess of 10,000 coupons,” added blogger Mashup Mom.

As before, if you hover over each coupon with your cursor, a tab will appear letting you know if it’s a “Manufacturer” or “Target Coupon”, before you choose to print. But with so many coupons now available on the site, all jumbled together, it’s a lot harder to pick out the store coupons. You can sort by category, newest, ending soon, highest value, even search by product name – but there’s no way to separate the store coupons from the manufacturer’s coupons.

Target representatives did not respond to requests for information about the website changes, though a customer service representative asked a Facebook commenter to “please stick with us as we fine tune the procedure, and check back for updates.”

Of course, Target’s printable coupon site is designed for everyone, and not just heavy couponers who know their way around Target store coupons, manufacturer’s coupons, Cartwheel and the many other ways to combine savings at Target. And one-stop coupon shopping is what many everyday shoppers are looking for.

It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the change comes just a few months after a research report indicated that coupon prints had declined sharply on Target’s website, while virtually every other retailer’s website saw increases. According to Kantar Media, visitors to Walgreens’ website printed or digitally clipped more than twice as many coupons in 2014 as in the previous year. Kroger- and Albertsons-owned stores saw a 25% increase, coupon printing on Walmart’s website was up 18% – and Target’s rate plummeted by 36%.

Now there are hundreds more reasons for casual printable coupon clippers to pay a visit to Target’s website. And hosting Coupons.com coupons means Target also now gets a small fee for each coupon printed. So if higher website traffic, together with that new Coupons.com income stream, helps Target offer more and better coupons for everyone – well then, for all of the website’s frustrations, maybe it really is new and improved after all.