This week I was contacted by CouponChief to write a review of their website and service. Since I am all about saving money and sharing my experiences with my readers, I thought it would be beneficial to both parties and I agreed. In addition, there is a side to the CouponChief site that looks like it may offer some promise to save the consumer some money. As you will see near the bottom of the post, I really hesitated even posting this to my blog. In the end though, I feel my readers and the consumer need to see it and decided to publish.

My first opinion was another cookie-cutter style coupon site in a market that is already pretty well established. There are countless shopping portals that give you cash back by clicking through their links such as ebates, FatWallet, or Big Crumbs to name a few. Whenever I search for coupon codes, CouponChief never even comes up in the searches, but this may be more of an optimization issue with CouponChief and Google, etc. However, I decided to give them a try and really see if there is a benefit over and above what services I already feel comfortable using.

CouponChief’s main business model is they have 1000’s of coupon codes that can be used to save money or get free shipping at over 15,000 online stores. Note, these are not the type of coupons that you can clip and take to your local store to save $0.55 off a can of soup. These are online coupons only.

So the idea is if I need to buy diapers, for example, from Diapers.com, I would go to CouponChief first and search for Diapers.com. In this example, I would currently find 60 different coupon codes that I could use for various things like 20% off or free shipping. They definitely have a nice collection of coupons, mostly supplied by the users.

Here lies the biggest advantage for the consumer willing to put in some time with this site. If you are an average consumer and only looking to save some money on your purchase, you would just use a coupon and move on. However, if you are a member of CouponChief, and you have a coupon code that is not currently on the site, you can join the Pays-2-Share program, where you will get paid for each person that clicks and uses your coupon. That appears to be a distinct advantage over other shopping portals. I have my concerns though.

The idea is that if a user clicks on the coupon code, the site portals you to the store you are looking to purchase from, and CouponChief than receives a cut from any purchases the buyer makes as a commission. CouponChief is then claiming they will give the member that uploaded the coupon 2% of the referral fee. The buyer saved some money using the coupon code, CouponChief got a piece of the pie, and shares a small portion with the member who supplied the coupon. However, what guarantee is there that the member will ever see what they are due from CouponChief?

I say this because linking through shopping portals can be very term dependent. For example, if I were to shop through the FatWallet portal, I would receive a portion of my purchases back from FatWallet. There are also a list of approved coupon codes that the store will pay a commission back to FatWallet. If you use an unapproved coupon code, you may never see any cash back, assuming neither does FatWallet. There lies my concern with the CouponChief business plan, and how does the member who supplied the code ever know that? A member is putting in work for CouponChief and getting all the advantage, yet the guy at the bottom may get nothing.

Maybe CouponChief has a different agreement with their stores that allow commission on any coupon, but it is doubtful considering the countless shopping portal sites I have used in the past, and they all had conditions on the use of coupons. Here is a quick blurp from CouponChief’s facts section, which makes it seem like certain stores allow a commission on any coupon, but again it is not entirely clear.

Our business relies on relationships we have established with the participating stores. If we don’t have a relationship, we don’t receive any money from the purchase. When we don’t get any compensation, we can’t compensate you. In addition, some stores simply prohibit us from paying you for transactions.

Overall, CouponChief may be a good location to search for coupons before making a purchase, but definitely not linking through for cash back. Here is another quick example using AdvanceAutoParts.com with either CouponChief or FatWallet (or any other shopping portal).

AdvanceAutoParts.com using CouponChief
$100 purchase – 15% off coupon code = $85 cost

AdvanceAutoParts.com using FatWallet
$100 purchase – 15% off coupon code – 7% cash back on after coupon amount = $79.05 cost

So by not using CouponChief, the consumer would save more money shopping through a portal that actually gives the buyer a portion of the cash back. The fact is, CouponChief provides little value to the consumer when it comes to actually saving money other than providing the coupons. It looks and operates on the same style as retailmenot.com and others. With the Pays-2-Share program, it looks like CouponChief is the real only winner of the whole process considering the member who did all the work to find and upload the coupon only gets 2% of the commission CouponChief is given by the member stores.

We were compensated for writing this review, but all commentary and opinions are our own.