The wobbly economy is contributing to a rush by millions of online shoppers to a decidedly low-tech business: coupons.
The number of people scouring the Internet in search of coupons that they can print and present to retailers, or codes that provide them with discounts on retail sites such as Amazon.com, is up sharply.
Leading coupon Web sites reported record traffic on Cyber Monday. RetailMeNot had 1.1 million visitors, up 57 percent from a year ago. CouponCabin was visited 400,000 times, up 65 percent from a year ago. And BradsDeals.com said traffic was up 174 percent, to 16,000 visitors per hour.
The growth has picked up since summer, when 44.1 million adults printed coupons they found on Web sites. That’s a 21 percent increase from the same period last year, says market researcher Experian Simmons.
What’s driving coupon use is not surprising: 42 percent of consumers intend to spend less online this Christmas than they did in 2008, says Nielsen analyst Maya Swedowsky, who surveys shopper attitudes.
“Any merchant without an aggressive coupon strategy is at a clear disadvantage,” says Loren Bendele, CEO of Savings.com, which works with more than 4,000 major retailers, including Apple, Gap and Home Depot. Coupon-related purchases at his site have doubled to $136 million this year vs. the same period in 2008.
One-third of all U.S. Internet users in October visited a deal-oriented site such as RetailMeNot and CoolSavings.com.
It’s not just the recession driving the growth of online coupons. Internet use continues to grow. Smartphones in particular are booming and adding a high-tech dimension to the phenomenon.
Shoppers can use their phone cameras to scan a product’s bar code and instantly find and retrieve a coupon to lower the price.
And social-networking sites including Facebook and Twitter are joining the ranks of destinations that offer coupons.
Coupons.com, the largest Internet coupon distributor, is available…