If you’re looking for printable coupons for healthy products, there are fewer of them available these days. That’s thanks to economic challenges, changing market conditions – and hackers.
The printable coupon site CommonKindness has been out of commission for months now, leaving shoppers and brands to wonder when – and whether – it will come back online.
“We got hacked and AWS [site host Amazon Web Services] terminated our instance. We are working on getting it back up and running soon!” CommonKindness recently informed users on its Facebook page.
But the hack happened back in August. And despite the stark but optimistic message on the CommonKindness.com website (“We are temporarily down. We should be up and running in the next few days,”) getting back online is proving to be easier said than done.
“We’re not exactly certain when the site will be back up and running, but we are still working on it with Amazon and one of its premier partners,” Karen Frame, the CEO of CommonKindness owner Makeena, told Coupons in the News. “We had hoped it would have been back up and running in August (soon after the instance terminated), a few days after it went down.”
Frame did not elaborate on the nature of the hack, or whether the site could be restored as it was or if it had to be rebuilt from scratch. She did reassure users that no user information was compromised.
The hack comes at a particularly inopportune time for CommonKindness, which together with its companion app Makeena, now have the healthy coupon-and-rebate space nearly all to themselves. BerryCart, the rebate app that focused on natural products and healthy food brands, shut down last month, after, in the CEO’s words, “the money ran out.” And last year at around this time, Mambo Sprouts stopped offering printable coupons for healthy products, then shut down its website, then filed for bankruptcy.
As printable coupons become less popular, and mainstream rebate apps like Ibotta incorporate more natural and healthy products into their stable of offerings, it may seem to be a tough time for niche healthy-coupon-and-rebate companies – hacks notwithstanding.
But CommonKindness is a survivor. While it has largely flown under the radar, it’s managed to stick around since it was launched in its original form back in 2009, with a unique business model that allows smaller, lesser-known brands to offer printable coupons for free, paying only when the coupons are redeemed. And couponers can designate a favorite charity to receive a portion of the revenue generated from their coupon use.
While CommonKindness is not technically focused on healthy living and natural products, those tend to be the types of brands that offer coupons on the site. So it seemed a natural fit when healthy rebate app Makeena acquired CommonKindness in 2017.
“Makeena shares the same passion and values for making sustainable products available at an affordable price and giving back to the community that is the hallmark of CommonKindness.com,” CommonKindness co-founder Sarah Schloemer said at the time. “With this acquisition,” Frame added, “we’re well positioned to expand our offerings so consumers can receive rebates on a variety of health and wellness products at any retailer nationwide.”
The immediate plan was to begin combining each platform’s offers, while maintaining CommonKindness and Makeena as separate entities, with a long-term goal of merging the two. Now, the CommonKindness hack may accelerate those plans.
“We had planned on keeping CommonKindness as is (with a few minor changes to the site),” Frame told Coupons in the News. Eventually, though “we will be moving CommonKindness to Makeena and renaming it MakeenaKindness.”
With any luck, CommonKindness will be back up soon, so its transition can occur on Makeena’s schedule – and not the hackers’.
