Coupons.com Prepares For NFC And Future
When it comes to couponing, many believe the craze should focus on local, daily deals. Not so, said Steve Horowitz, CTO at Coupons.com. Think national, third-party issued coupons from massive brands redeemed by consumers through retailers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Coupons.com's positioning here is a direct counter-thesis to the daily-deals frenzy dominating early 2011. CTO Steve Horowitz argues the durable business is national, third-party coupons issued by big brands and redeemed through retailers — not the local merchant deals that have captured the hype — and says the company is already preparing its platform for NFC-based redemption, a technology getting heavy attention coming out of February's Mobile World Congress.
First-order effects
- Big consumer brands gain a redemption channel that scales nationally without per-merchant sales negotiations, while retailers become the point where those coupons are validated — putting Coupons.com's infrastructure between brands, stores, and shoppers.
Second-order effects
- Local daily-deal operators face a rival model whose unit economics rest on brand ad budgets rather than merchant discounts, and if NFC handsets proliferate, point-of-sale vendors and retailers come under pressure to accept tap-to-redeem coupons alongside cards.
Third-order effects
- Whoever controls redemption captures the shopper-level purchase data — the same dynamic the New York Times flagged in April 2010 with its report that online coupons 'know a lot about you' (online coupons and user data) — so the shift toward mobile redemption concentrates both targeting power and privacy exposure in fewer platform hands.
The trend: Digital couponing is splitting into two models — hyper-local deal marketplaces versus brand-issued coupons redeemed digitally at retail — with NFC-enabled phones poised to decide which side owns the redemption data layer.