What is it with discount coupon sites?

[StewartR]

Today we had a customer call us to say that the discount code he had wasn't working on our website. It turned out there was a very good reason for that, which was that the discount code he had wasn't ours. It wasn't an old one which had lapsed, or anything like that - it simply didn't look anything like any discount code we've ever created.

This guy said he'd got the code from one of these discount coupon sites - he couldn't remember which one - so I did a bit of digging. I was astonished. There are these sites out there which are just making up codes and expiry dates and claiming they'll provide discounts on our website, which of course they won't. And some of them even report non-zero success rates for the codes, which makes even less sense.

Some examples, all taken from different coupon sites: One (5% off at hotdeals.com). Two (£10 off) at voucherhoney.co.uk. Three (15% off at discountonline.co.uk). Four (50% off at freevouchercodeuk.com) Five (£10 off at couponcodehome.com).

What gives? Can anyone help me make sense of this?

 

[Sharky]

They are click bait nothing more.

Get to the top of Google search by clicks, oops code has expired (more likely didn't exist as noted) but while you're here Mr (or Mrs) Visitor can i tempt you with this...

all imo

 

[an1uk]

There's those silly fake vouchers for Asda and Aldi that keep doing the rounds on Facebook too.

 

[Keith W]

Clickety click makes those add cookies stick

 

[Uneducated_Rick]

Today we had a customer call us to say that the discount code he had wasn't working on our website. It turned out there was a very good reason for that, which was that the discount code he had wasn't ours. It wasn't an old one which had lapsed, or anything like that - it simply didn't look anything like any discount code we've ever created.

This guy said he'd got the code from one of these discount coupon sites - he couldn't remember which one - so I did a bit of digging. I was astonished. There are these sites out there which are just making up codes and expiry dates and claiming they'll provide discounts on our website, which of course they won't. And some of them even report non-zero success rates for the codes, which makes even less sense.

Some examples, all taken from different coupon sites: One (5% off at hotdeals.com). Two (£10 off) at voucherhoney.co.uk. Three (15% off at discountonline.co.uk). Four (50% off at freevouchercodeuk.com) Five (£10 off at couponcodehome.com).

What gives? Can anyone help me make sense of this?

A couple of years ago there was 2 or 3 legit sites that would catalogue the codes, show expiration dates etc. They were good.

Now there's thousands of them that have any code that was ever valid even from 2001. They hide the codes until you click on links (presumably generating referal fees or add revenue) and are useless. They don't care you don;t get the discount, they get their fraction of a penny, multiply by thousands of people for many different sites.

I've even seen a couple sites with expiration dates of 2/30/17.... yes, the 30th of February! Whatever script they use to generate the pages would build a date by seperately selecting a random day and month