Thursday, March 31, 2016

A Coupon Clearing House Helps Companies Give Discounts

By Walter Wilson


Companies, whether new or long established, need to occasionally go out of their way to attract business. With so much competition for consumer dollars, a product maker must decide if giving a discount will get them more sales. One of the most popular ways to give consumers a discount is to offer them coupons. A coupon clearing house helps both retailers who accept coupons and the manufacturers make the redemption of these coupons seamless.

The thought of hiring a team to separate and sort accepted coupons is not ideal, especially since it can be done by a specialized company instead. These clearing houses are set up to sort and account for each coupon, generating payment reports and making life much easier on both the manufacturers and the stores that accept the coupons. It is efficient and cost effective.

The way it works is that a retailers mails them to the clearinghouse, which uses special equipment and specially trained employees to sort through piles of them in an efficient manner. A payment report is produced in a quick manner, streamlining what would otherwise be a monumental task. This saves an inordinate amount of time and money to each store.

Once an amount owed is determined, payment is then made and sent to the store that accepted all the coupons. They get their money back, and usually some kind of handling fee as well to pay for postage and any other costs associated with having accepted the coupon from the customer.

This is how the clearing houses help the retailers, but here is quite a few things they do for the actual product manufacturers as well. Data reports can be compiled on behalf of the issuing company to see if the coupons are actually working. The reports track usage and see if it is cost effective to continue issuing the discounts or whether it is all a bust.

The clearing houses keep statistics about each store and how many coupons they send in to get payment back. Audits can be conducted on these statistics to see if there are any unusual patterns. These patterns could be a sign of fraud, which makes it easier to detect when something is going wrong. This protects all parties and helps make sure that nobody is doing anything wrong.

Digital codes and coupons are a trend that has really picked up in recent years. There are many advantages, including using less paper and ink, helping the environment, and not having anything to mail in. A clearing house can make sure that these email, text and app codes work and are being redeemed properly.

Coupon fraud is a huge and costly liability when it comes to making and redeeming a coupon. Clearinghouses have highly trained employees who look at the coupon to spot fakes. If they do spot a fake, they can alert stores to stop taking these and put out a fraud alert. This saves money and discourages the criminals who make these fakes so that they will stop doing it. By avoiding fraud, makers can then continue to issue new coupons and keep consumers happy.




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