Affiliate Marketing Blog: Expired Discount Codes

Sunday, 3 August 2008

Expired Discount Codes

What's the bloody point of including expired discount codes in your site? Do we do it because others do? Do we do it in a masked attempt to help surfers find codes that shouldn't work but do?

Or are they just there to act as cookie-cutters?

Should merchants demand that expired codes not be present on voucher sites? And should merchants not just list expired discount codes on their sites as well as banning voucher code sites from using expired codes? I wonder how much merchants can save by cutting out the code cookie cutters!?!

I know I've got mates in this industry and have listed some myself for the sole reason that merchants don't ask affiliates not to - but should we be listing them at all?

3 Comments:

At 3 August 2008 at 22:03 , Anonymous said...: I totally agree with you, i think everyone knows the worst culprits, yet i really don't understand it. Does it provide a good user experience? No. Does it encourage repeat visits to your site? No.
Does it add value for the visitor? No.

I make a consious effort to make sure my code sites are as uptodate as possible, sure some codes may slip through the net, others might be left expired for a week or two but i always display expiry dates so visitors can quickly see if a code is out of date or not.
At 4 August 2008 at 13:18 , admin said...: If you put an expiry date next to the code, wouldn't that be O.K?

If you haven't got some kind of database set up to automatically remove them when they expire, then it is easy to miss some that need to be removed.
At 6 August 2008 at 23:18 , Anonymous said...: I'm not sure that it doesn't improve the user experience you know.

If you search google for "Merchant X voucher codes" - site one shows the expired codes as being valid, site 2 does the same but site 3 shows "There are no valid codes for Merchant X and the codes below are now expired".

To me, that shows that site 3 is up to date, not wasting my time, on top of their game and better than sites 1 and 2 even if Google doesn't think so.

Therefore I think showing expired codes can be good for the user experience.