What does Chicago have that no other U.S. city has this holiday season? The top two busiest coupon Web sites.
Top ranked was Groupon, the daily deal site, with 10 million unique visitors in November, up 54 percent over the previous month, according to online research firm ComScore Inc. Second was CouponCabin, a coupon-code aggregator, with 8.8 million visitors, a 400 percent increase over October.
Coupon sites, which offer promotional codes and other discounts to consumers, ranked as the top-gaining category of Web sites at the start of the holiday season, ComScore said. A record 44 million Americans visited a coupon site during November, up 40 percent since October.
“As the holiday shopping season kicked off in November, Americans were quick to take advantage of retailers’ early promotions and savings in crossing a few items off their shopping list,” Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore, said in a statement. “Cyber Monday — the Monday after Thanksgiving — came in as the heaviest online spending day on record in the U.S., which contributed a strong portion of traffic growth at retail and coupon sites.”
Groupon had its biggest holiday shopping season — what it calls Grouponicus — since the site started in 2008, said Julie Mossler, a company spokeswoman. Groupon, on West Chicago Avenue, hasn’t released specific numbers yet, but Groupon sent more than 100 million special Grouponicus e-mails to people who opted-in, Mossler said. The e-mails were independent from its daily deals.
“We’re thrilled that millions of customers found Grouponicus in their hearts, and the perfect gifts on Groupon,” Mossler said. “It’s great to see two Chicago-based companies, Groupon and CouponCabin, providing real value for consumers.”
“It’s definitely a big deal, considering we were second to Groupon,” said Jackie Warrick, chief savings officer at CouponCabin.com, based on West Illinois Street. She attributed part of the site’s success in visitors — up 50 percent over last year — to its testing of discount coupon codes it offers and its guarantee that all coupon codes will work. If one of its verified codes is expired or doesn’t work, CouponCabin buys the user dinner, in the form of a $25 gift certificate from Restaurant.com. The guarantee was introduced in November.
Other top-ranked coupon sites were Coupons.com with 6.4 million visitors, BlackFriday.info with 5.4 million visitors and RetailMeNot.com with 5 million visitors.
A sampling of other coupon- and deal-related sites based in Chicagoland include Bradsdeals.com, Jillcataldo.com, Mamaloot.com and ChicagoShopping.com, a Chicago Tribune Web site. Coolsavings.com is a property of Chicago-based marketing services company Q Interactive. And recently launched CouponNetwork.com is based in Chicago. It’s a division of Catalina Marketing, the firm responsible for coupons printed along with supermarket cash-register receipts.
The top coupon sites, based on unique visitors in November, according to ComScore:
Groupon.com: 10 million
CouponCabin.com: 8.8 million
Coupons.com: 6.4 million
BlackFriday.info: 5.4 million
RetailMeNot.com: 5 million
Eversave.com: 2.7 million
Dealspl.us: 2 million
CouponMountain.com: 1.5 million
MyPoints.com: 1.5 million
Ebates.com: 1.5 million
I’m a Chicago webmaster who’s had the pleasure of meeting many of the Coupon Cabin staff at various Senate Bill hearings and meetings regarding legislation that might soon make running these types of sites an impossibility in the state of Illinois.
Senate Bill 3353 is painting businesses like coupon aggregator sites and many other small-time self-publishers of online magazines and blogs as ’salespeople’. If us online advertisers are deemed to be ’salespeople’ for the entities advertising with us, we would constitute as a point of nexus, and therefore a tax-collecting liability, to many out-of-state retailers. When this law was passed in several other states, many retailers stopped advertising with online publishers like myself and Coupon Cabin – forcing many companies and individuals to either move to another state to continue gaining revenue from advertising, or else go out of business.
Hopefully when Senate Bill 3353 gets revisited in Springfield in 2011, our industry will be recognized for what it is – independent publishers earning revenue through advertisements and not a covert sales force for out-of-state retailers looking to ’skirt Illinois sales tax’. Chicago, as well as further afield in Illinois with the likes of FatWallet.com, has many bright and rising online publishing stars. The affiliate marketing network shareasale.com is also based in Chicago and is a major force in this new realm of online advertising. It would be a shame to force us all to leave the city.
I’ll be heading to Springfield for the next Senate Bill hearing on this issue and will be looking forward to catching up with some of the Coupon Cabin crowd. I sincerely hope Chicago continues to be a force to be reckoned with in online publishing.
Laura Schofield
Owner & Founder – Centsible.net