Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Can Internet Coupons Replace The Conventional Ones??

Internet coupons or online coupons are becoming very popular especially in the last few years. A coupon is a document or a ticket which can be exchanged for a rebate or even a financial discount while buying a product or some other piece. The internet marketers are looking at online coupons as one of the best ways to attract customers to their businesses.

Conventionally any type of coupons is given by the retailers or the manufacturers of consumer packaged goods, which can be used in the retail stores. They see these coupons as a means of sales promotion. They are normally issued through magazines, mails, news papers and of late through the internet. When the coupons are distributed through the internet/ World Wide Web they are called online coupons or internet coupons.


Internet coupons are very cheap and at times there is no cost that has to be taken care of by the business man. As the user has to take care of the printing cost also, the businessman can easily distribute these coupons for a negligible cost. As the number of people using the internet is increasing exponentially in the recent times, it is very easy to reach a huge number of interested customers through the internet for almost all kinds of businesses. In addition to this, as so many valid mailing lists are available at a very reasonable cost, businesses are getting attracted towards the usage of internet coupons rather than going for the conventional ones.


The trend of internet coupons is not only on a raise in the United States market but it is also on the raise in the Asian and European markets. The main reasons behind this are the increased usage of the internet and low cost involved in the distribution of the coupons over the internet.


The online marketers call these internet coupons with a wide variety of names. Some of them include “promotional codes, coupon codes, shopping codes, promo codes” and so on. What ever the name given to these internet coupons may be; but the main intention behind their distribution is the sales promotion. How ever, internet coupons can not be a supplementary thing to the conventional coupons in many businesses like retail and manufacturing and so on. Hence these online coupons should be treated only as the complementary coupons to the conventional ones at least until the internet penetration goes up to 90%.