Ever wonder why a Coupons.com page might not have a coupon? Here’s the answer

We hope that if you’re reading this, you’re one of the millions of people who we’ve helped save money. If we’re a part of your typical shopping experience, we’ve done our jobs well, and we’re honored to help you find a deal anywhere you can. 

If you visit our site regularly, that might also mean that you occasionally come to look for savings for a retailer and find that we don’t have a page for them. Rarer still, you may find the retailer page, but that there isn’t a coupon code or an offer available to knock a few dollars off your order. 

So, why? Why wouldn’t we have a coupon for you to use? Why isn’t there something there for you to try?

The simple answer is that it’s because, at that moment in time, there isn’t a meaningful way to help you save money at that given retailer. So instead of bogging down your shopping flow with codes that don’t work to make our pages look more robust, we’ve been extremely selective and only show you the offers that we’ve tested and know will work. Let us explain further. 

What happens when a retailer doesn’t have any discounts on our pages

More often than not, it means that a retailer truly doesn’t have any codes or deals for you to use. We know that because we’ve done the research, tried and tested anything we could find, and essentially confirmed there’s nothing to use at that moment. 

In order to secure and confirm savings for you, our Coupons.com team works in close partnership with the retailers, which is one of three ways we source offers. 

It’s all fun and games (rather, expertise, perseverance, and building relationships!) to find and source the best offers on your behalf, but sometimes, retailers or their representatives simply don’t have any offers to give.

When that happens, it translates to the retailer’s Coupons.com page, where you may only find two, one, or no deals live. Sure, our competitors may have 15 codes on their pages, but do they all work? Knowing that the brand has no offer available, we can easily answer that: They won’t. 

So why would someone still show offers on their coupons page, when there are no offers available for that retailer? 

That’s a good question. And while we can’t speak on behalf of anyone, it could be speculated that this is done when a site doesn’t want to admit to being unable to find something for you. 

As coupon sites, we’re all here to find the best coupons and deals. And when we can’t find any, it can feel like we didn’t do our job right. This could arguably create a situation in which competitors might show old, expired content instead of active content or maybe even invent a deal that doesn’t exist.

The truth is, we don’t know why they do that, but we are committed to remaining transparent to you and telling you truthfully when we weren’t able to find a good deal for you. This is the main reason why Coupons.com only shows a very curated selection of only the best offers on a retailer page. 

We are not an aggregator of everything out there; We are your trusted savings experts who find the most value-adding savings opportunities for you. And when we don’t find any, we don’t show any. 

Why retailers don’t always have deals

As much as we want to see savings and sales all the time, that’s just not feasible for some retailers. There are those like Macy’s, Kohl’s, or Office Depot that always have an offer for you to use. But other retailers, like Nike or Lego, don’t often run codes or discounts. And then there are the extreme cases that basically never have them. For example, have you tried finding a coupon code for Dyson? They only have a code available once or twice per year!

These retailers have restricted savings opportunities and aren't even providing exclusive discounts to publishers like us who have been in the industry for decades to bring to shoppers like you. The reason for this can vary, but it’s often due to their internal business strategies.

It’s never the answer we want to give you when you come to us asking, “How can I save today?” But periodically, there just isn’t a truly helpful solution. And when that happens, you have our word that we are not going to provide you with false hope in the form of non-working codes. 

In our experience, the silver lining here is that when you have retailers that don’t always provide discounts for us to bring you, they often reserve savings for specific times during the year. And that can often mean truly significant savings when they do disclose a unique savings code with us. 

When that happens, we’re able to easily show you that it’s a good time to buy at that retailer so that you’re confident in your purchase. On our pages, we openly disclose just how good the offers we are actively featuring really are. To do that, we compare the current offers with all of those from our database of historical offers and advise you to either buy asap, or maybe wait for a better time. 

Just look for the “Better than usual” or “Lower than usual” tags on offers to know where you stand:

The deals you find on our pages really are the best ones available

If we could make up a code at the drop of a hat that would help you save, trust us, we’d do it. But, unfortunately, we don’t get to make the coupons and codes. We’re simply the vehicle that brings them to you. 

When there is only a handful of codes, discounts, or deals that our team is able to verify and confirm work, you’ll only ever find those opportunities on that retailer’s Coupons.com page. And, if a retailer never even runs sales, let alone doles out a discount code, we may make the choice to cull that retailer from our site altogether. While we hate removing a retailer from our pages, we selectively curate the retailers and deals you find on Coupons.com to ensure quality over quantity every single time. 

To this point, over the last year, we’ve made the decision to selectively remove retailers from our site if they never offer any savings opportunities for shoppers. That way, we’re able to home in on retailers that do feature discount codes. 

Our methodology is stringent but allows you to put full faith in the content you find on our pages. We’ve filtered out a lot of noise to let you find working, meaningful deals every time rather than 25% of the time. 

And don’t forget that on every retailer page, you’ll find tips for saving at that retailer put together by our editors who have expertise in saving and first-hand knowledge of their portfolio of retailers. In addition to that, we have cashback opportunities for hundreds of retailers at any given time, so while you might not find a 10%-off code, you might get the chance to get 10% cashback with that purchase. 

So, the next time you come to one of our retailer pages and find that there are only four coupons, or maybe that there are none at all, know that you can trust there isn’t a bold savings opportunity for that retailer at that moment. 

We’ve done the legwork; we’ve searched the internet, we’ve reached out to all our contacts, we’ve scoured our communities, and tested and verified each potential offer. Then, we only ever bring you what truly benefits you.

The Clip is where the people behind Coupons.com get to speak plainly. No press releases. No corporate polish. Just honest stories from people who think hard every day about helping you spend less and keep more.