Convenience Store Coupons For Your Mobile Phone

Why has the affiliate couponing industry abandoned convenience store coupons in the c-store industry? If you dig deeper into the any affiliate coupon program (retailmenot.com, coupon.com) you will find that there are not many if any coupons for convenience stores. It seems like there is a disconnect between the coupon affiliates and the c-store industry. If you consider how much money is at stake it does not make any sense. $1 out of every $24 dollars spent in this country is in a convenience store. So has the coupon affiliates abandoned convenience channel?

I think one of the problems is the sheer number of c-stores. There are 154,195 convenience stores in the U.S. as of December, 2015 (NACS/Nielsen) and the site count keeps growing every year. Another possible problem could be the fragmentation of the industry. There are many regional players and only a handful of national players. Another problem is probably the speed of the transaction. We have all been in line at the grocery store and had that lady in front of us pulling a bunch of coupons out of her little pouch bag which simply slows down the transaction time at the register. That is not good for the convenience site. The average time it takes for someone to get in and out with a purchase at a convenience store is 3 minutes and 33 seconds (NACS). However, with the advent of the smartphone it becomes a lot easier to use a coupon. Digital couponing is basically changing the way we save money at the c-store. The usage trend of all retail store coupons is definitely in an upward trajectory and it doesn't look like it is going to slow down any time soon. Convenience stores account for 34.2% of all retail outlets in the United States (NACS). There is no other U.S. retail channel that is such an important part of virtually every community in the country and that is reflected in the overall dollar sales of the industry at $696.1 billion. Those sales represent about 4.1% of the entire estimated $17.7 trillion U.S. gross domestic product.

There is a marriage of sorts going on with convenience store coupons and the smart phone. It is estimated that upwards of 5% of sales transactions within the store will include a digital coupon of some sort by the year 2019 (Gasbuddy.com). It is predicted that there will be around 1.05 billion global mobile coupon users in the world by 2019. With the ease of use the GPS location features on the phones and push technology getting better by the day it is no wonder why convenience store coupons usage on your smart phone is on the rise. Digital coupon redemption is roughly 10% right now. While the old fashion print or paper coupons have a redemption rate of 1% or less. 90% of digital coupon users redeem their coupons within just a few days of receiving them on their phones. One would think that the redemption speed will only increase for the convenience customer and redeem them sooner. It's all about speed of the transaction in this retail space.  For more information visit the site Convenience Store Coupons.

Will The Smartphone Bridge the Gap for Convenience Store Couponing

​To say that the business of couponing is big is an understatement. According to the Association of Coupon Professionals, $3.39 billion in coupons were redeemed or three billion individual redemptions of the total 310 billion coupons issued.

So how many coupons did your stores take in last year? If you said, “not many,” then you’re not alone. The majority — nearly 90% — of coupons are paper based and distributed by freestanding inserts (FSI) in newspapers and magazines, and the overwhelming majority of the redemptions take place in the grocery or chain drug channels.

So why doesn’t our industry attract these valuable sales drivers? Why don’t we target the many customers who regularly use coupons? The answer lies both in consumer psychology as well as limitations in enabling technologies.

Consumers are far less willing to use convenience store coupons than at a grocery store, and I think it is safe to say that consumers do not generally think of convenience stores as having low prices, so value seekers do not do an inordinate amount of shopping with us.

Not surprisingly, the number-one reason a customer shops at a convenience store is, in fact, convenience. This brings up the second consumer hurdle: When you are in a hurry and looking to get in and out of a store quickly, how likely are you to want to hassle with paper coupons?

As if these challenges weren’t enough, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies do not often develop deals with the convenience store shopper in mind. Part of the reason is our industry’s historical lack of coupon enabling technologies. Couponing is an industry with its fair share of waste, fraud and abuse, and our industry represents a higher than normal amount of risk for CPGs.

For example, in the grocery and chain drug channels, the majority of the point-of-sale (POS) systems are equipped to properly process coupons per the coupon issuer’s rules — a capability virtually non-existent in our channel. In our stores, more than likely the cashier would have to manually run a presented coupon and physically read the coupon and make all the proper decisions of acceptance, such as expiration date, qualifying products being purchased, etc. This leaves room for inaccuracies, which understandably are not something the issuing CPG companies are thrilled about. So to some extent, technology has been holding us back. Yet ironically, it may be technology that allows us greater participation in the future.  more