Coupons.com Printable Coupons Aren’t Dead Just Yet

Coupons.com will be fading away before the end of the year, but Coupons.com’s printable coupons will be sticking around – for a while longer, at least.

Parent company Quotient Technology announced last week that it would be retiring the Coupons.com brand, website and app, and replacing them with an American revival of the Shopmium cash-back app, which was last seen in this country back in 2017.

Left unsaid was what exactly would happen to the print-at-home coupons currently offered on Coupons.com, considering the site is meant to be replaced by an app dedicated to digital rebates.

Quotient has now clarified its plans, somewhat. The company is reassuring printable fans that print-at-home coupons will still be available after Coupons.com goes away, if they still want them. But only if they really, truly want them.

“Quotient’s focus is to provide consumers with choice in saving across redemption methods,” the company offered in a statement to Coupons in the News. “Quotient has been in the print coupon business since our founding, and to the extent shoppers want printable coupons we intend to provide them.”

So it appears that Quotient does not necessarily plan to retire printable coupons the moment it retires Coupons.com, perhaps offering them on a revamped Shopmium.com website. But the statement does give Quotient some wiggle room, allowing it to adjust its plans any time it determines that shoppers no longer “want printable coupons.”

And the numbers would seem to indicate that shoppers don’t want printable coupons as much as they used to – or at least they can’t find printable coupons they want to use. According to figures from Inmar Intelligence, printable coupons reached their peak of popularity in 2013, when 5% of all coupons redeemed were printed at home, representing some 147 million coupons overall. Over time, though, the number of coupons redeemed and the percentage that were printable coupons both declined sharply. By 2020, the year for which the most recent full-year statistics are available, only about 1% of all coupons used were printables, representing a comparatively paltry 10 million coupons.

So in just seven years, we’ve gone from redeeming 147 million print-at-home coupons, to only about 10 million. There’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg quality to the drastic decline – shoppers’ increasing preference for digital paperless coupons has certainly played a part, but many manufacturers and printable coupon providers like Quotient have expressed a clear preference for digital paperless coupons as well, making more digital coupons and fewer printables available as a result.

Coupons.com once had hundreds of coupons available at a time, while, as of this writing, it has about 50. You could blame the reduced supply on the reduced demand – or you could conclude that the reduced demand is because of the reduced supply.

Either way, it will be relatively easy for Quotient to look at numbers like these and declare at any time that shoppers no longer appear to “want printable coupons.” After all, Quotient CEO Steven Boal says consumers – and his company – have been moving away from printed coupons for years now.

“The future isn’t in physical coupons – it’s in digital, which continues to grow in popularity every year,” Boal told Coupons in the News last year. “And as the world continues to evolve, we will remain on the cutting edge, providing consumers with innovative solutions every step of the way.”

Print-at-home coupons, which were once Coupons.com’s core offering, may be around for a while longer, even after Coupons.com itself goes away. But not forever. “Paper coupons, which include print-at-home coupons, will go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird before too terribly long,” Boal said.

Quotient had signaled its shift away from printed coupons long before last week’s announcement of the impending retirement of Coupons.com. The company itself was called Coupons.com until 2015, when it rebranded as Quotient Technology. “This is an exciting change that in many ways has been a long time coming,” Boal said at the time. “While the Coupons.com name and brand are incredibly strong – and will continue on as a consumer brand – we now do so much more.”

When, a few years later, the Coupons.com app shifted from offering printable and digital coupons to offering cash-back rebates, the Coupons.com name became increasingly anachronistic. When asked last year, however, whether the Coupons.com name might eventually be retired, Boal was noncommittal. “Coupons remain an important feature to our customers and we will continue to support them and provide value to them in any way we can,” he told Coupons in the News. “Our commitment to coupons has not changed, and will not change.”

But the company’s commitment to Coupons.com itself now has. What’s not yet known is what will happen to the Coupons.com domain name once the shift to Shopmium is complete later this year. The Coupons.com web address was already taken when the company was founded in 1998, so it paid a reported $2.2 million for it two years later, making it one of the most expensive domain name purchases up to that time. If Quotient no longer has a use for the Coupons.com site, it could be worth exponentially more today, if the company decides to sell it.

In the meantime, the company is focused on its shift to Shopmium as its new consumer-facing brand. “This is part of our continued strategy to provide ease and convenience of savings to shoppers as the shopping trip becomes more digital,” the company explained. The rebrand “will bring together the best of digital coupons and rebates, as well as the engaging consumer experience that the Shopmium app offers.”

And maybe some printable coupons, too – for just a little while longer.