Valpak Joins the Big-Discount Web Trend
Direct-mail coupon company Valpak will enter the burgeoning field of daily online deals with substantial discounts available at a new Web site.
The site so far provides no details about the offers to be made available starting this November and initially targeting four locations: Long Island NY, Omaha NE, New Haven CT and Las Vegas. But the company suggests that the coupons will cover both the everyday items Valpak now discounts in its familiar blue-envelope mailings and larger, more extravagant one-time purchases—“nice-to-have products and services like skydiving, a night out on the town or a trip to the spa”.
The service will feature discounts of 45% or more, creating the possibility that Valpak, which mails to some 40 million households annually in North America, intends to compete with large-rebate group couponing sites such as www.Groupon.com, www.LivingSocial.com and a raft of second-wave online coupon communities and group-buying sites.
Unlike many of those sites will not require a minimum number of subscribers to sign up for a deal before the offer takes effect. But registered users will have a narrow time window in which to claim some of the deals—perhaps as little as 24 hours, lending a sense of urgency to the redemption process. And deals will come with a maximum number of redemptions, to give marketers greater control over their couponing costs.
“These deals will extend our audience reach and also deliver great deals daily,” said Greg Bicket, president of Valpak parent Cox Target Media, in a release. “These are different from the kind of offers you’ll find on Valpak.com and in your monthly Valpak Blue Envelope. It’s a chance for consumers to save money on the things they want as well as take advantage of opportunities to treat themselves to something special.”
The group-couponing trend has been one of the most active segments of the coupon industry in the past year, with some 200 entrants now in the field. The philosophy behind these sites is usually to persuade merchants to offer steep discounts of 50% to 75% on selected services in return for a guaranteed influx of traffic from registered Web members.
Recent reports have cropped up of group coupons gone wrong. Many of the sites make their money by splitting revenue from the redemptions, and some merchants have alleged that they were not informed about the chance to cap those redemptions or discouraged from doing so, resulting in large losses when their coupons went viral.
