The Many Services Of A Coupon Clearing House

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.

Stores gladly accept coupons because they know it makes customers happy, and make them more likely to keep shopping at that location. They take the temporary loss, but then send in the coupons to be counted to a clearing house. This is much easier on both the manufacturers who issued it and the stores, since the clearing house does all the accounting work in one place.

Once they reach the clearinghouse, that business then goes through the task of sorting and counting all of them. They invoice each one and then add up the total of all of them. That is the amount owed. This is so much simpler than having to hire a special couponing staff who will separate and add these up. It is time saving as well, which is a big deal in the business world.

The amount on the invoice is then paid to the store, who recoups their temporary loss. They get the face value of the coupons, plus a handling fee for each one as well. This handling fee is meant to offset the cost of postage to the clearing house and any other costs incurred.

Retailers benefit greatly from these services, but manufacturers can get quite a few benefits as well. One of the things a clearing house can do for the product maker is to compile a report about usage of the coupons. This report allows the company to see if the issuing of coupons has been good for drumming up new business, or if it has not been a good use of company resources.

They can even audit a store's redemptions to look for any anomalies. This includes detecting fraud and checking redemption records to ensure that nothing is going on that could potentially make the product maker lose any money. It protects everyone involved, including the consumer, since it allows makers to keep giving out coupons, knowing they will be redeemed lawfully.

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.

In addition, a clearing house can look for fakes that some criminals make. They will take a real, scanning bar code and alter it so that it brings up a larger discount. This costs millions a year, but can be avoided with the services provided by a clearinghouse. Employees look at the actual physical piece of paper and look for unusual things that meant a fake. They then alert retailers so they can stop taking the coupons and stop the coupon fraud in its tracks.




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