Coupons are SO 20th Century
by Joshua Tretakoff | VP, Account Management 
The Baltimore Sun reports today on a growing problem with the coupon industry in the Internet age: fraud. Hapless retailers, being plagued by reprints or outright mockups of coupons from the Internet, are frequently pushing back by banning the acceptance of coupons that are printed at home.
Like the waning popularity of mail in rebate programs, this has all the earmarks of a long-standing incentive mechanism that may be ripe for declining results from consumer backlash. Instead, I think we’ll see an uptick on the adoption of POS systems that use real-time customer lookup to see any coupons associated with a customer. For those that can’t afford the POS capital investment, loyalty programs will most likely fill the void: rebate programs are being phased out in favor of point acceleration in many electronics retailers, so I expect we’ll see the same with coupons if this keeps up.
