If you haven’t yet made the switch from the Coupons.com app to Shopmium, you have about a month to do it. The owner of both apps has set a timetable for the long-expected retirement of the Coupons.com app, which will begin to wind down in July, with a precise closure date to be determined.
The move will bring to an end a nearly yearlong transition period in which the two apps, their offers and functions overlapped, even after owner Quotient Technology announced the sale of the Coupons.com website but continued to operate the corresponding app.
“Last year, we announced a shift in our direct-to-consumer strategy, moving away from Coupons.com,” Quotient CEO Matt Krepsik told Coupons in the News. “With the launch of our new flagship consumer savings app in the U.S. market, Shopmium, we aim to deliver convenience and choice in savings to consumers through a modern user experience.”
During the transition as the two apps coexisted, cash-back offers from each app couldn’t be combined, so you had to choose one or the other. Out of habit, or personal preference, some users chose to stick with the Coupons.com app instead of moving over to Shopmium. The apps are similar, in that they require you to upload photos of your receipt in order to claim cash-back offers for buying promoted products.
But the apps also have several differences, not the least of which is that Shopmium enforces a rule that you must activate offers before you shop. If the time stamp on your receipt shows you shopped before selecting your offers, your cash-back requests may be rejected. Shopmium also currently lacks certain features offered by the Coupons.com app. You can’t link a store card to bypass the need to submit receipts, for example. You also can’t search for offers by name, and you need to click on a brand to “discover this offer” in order to find out exactly what cash value the brand is offering and decide if it’s worth your while.
Shopmium’s marketing emails can also be grating in that they like to call users “honey” and “babe,” but that’s another story.
“Since the launch of the app, we have seen increased user engagement and positive feedback from consumers,” Krepsik said. “The retirement of the Coupons.com app reflects the next step in our transition strategy to Shopmium.”
For those who haven’t made the move to Shopmium yet, “we will continue to communicate with Coupons.com app users about the sunsetting of the app and any action they may need to take to access their cash-back savings,” Krepsik explained. “The app will continue to be accessible to existing users for a few months to give them the ability to transition to Shopmium, where they will be able to access, activate and redeem cash-back savings on new offers, as well as the majority of offers that exist within the Coupons.com app.” He also promised “new features and offers in the Shopmium app” in the coming months.
All of these changes were set in motion early last year, when Quotient announced it would resurrect Shopmium several years after closing it down in the U.S., positioning it as “Quotient’s new consumer facing brand, replacing Coupons.com.” Quotient later announced an agreement to sell the Coupons.com website to the European company Global Savings Group, in a transaction that’s set to be completed in July. Quotient will still provide the offers, while GSG will own and operate the actual website.
The Coupons.com app wasn’t part of the Coupons.com website’s sale to GSG. So while Quotient never quite said so until now, it seemed only a matter of time before the Coupons.com app would be retired altogether.
The missions of the Coupons.com app and website had long since diverged, anyway. The app launched in 2012 as a companion to the website, but its functionality was limited. You could only use the app to clip digital coupons to a store loyalty account, or, since this was before mobile printing was commonplace, email yourself a link to printable coupons that you could open and print from a desktop computer. In time, the ability to print directly from the app was added, but the app later adopted its current paperless format, in which you’d claim cash back after shopping instead of printing coupons beforehand. That, of course, made the app’s very name “Coupons.com” somewhat incongruous and obsolete, since it didn’t really involve coupons at all anymore.
Now, with the retirement of the Coupons.com app, and the impending sale of the Coupons.com website, Quotient is taking another big step away from the property – and the product – it was once named for. The company had been called Coupons.com for nearly two decades, until adopting the Quotient Technology name in 2015, in order to signal its intention to develop “new solutions that advance the promotions, media and precision marketing industries.”
“The name change could also be a hedge against the day when printable coupons – the company’s flagship product, since 1998 – just aren’t around anymore,” Coupons in the News reported at the time.
Today, printable coupons are still around, but they’re far less commonplace than they once were. And while Quotient will still provide printable coupon content to the new owners of Coupons.com, the sale of the website and retirement of the app severs one of the last remaining consumer-facing links to legacy coupons, from the company that once built its business around the product.
Instead, Quotient is moving on to Shopmium, a next-generation app whose name makes no reference to “coupons” at all. And now Coupons.com app users will have to move on as well – ready or not.
Image source: Quotient Technology
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