How We Verify
Every coupon and deal on CouponsDo is checked against the merchant’s own website before it goes live. We don’t copy codes from other coupon sites, and we don’t publish an offer just because it’s doing the rounds online. If we can’t see it on the merchant’s official site — or test it ourselves — we don’t present it as verified.
That sounds obvious, but plenty of coupon sites don’t work this way. Many of them scrape each other’s listings, so a dead code can bounce around the internet for months with nobody ever checking it. We’d rather list fewer offers and stand behind the ones we do show. When you open a deal on CouponsDo, it should work — or, if the merchant has changed it since we last checked, we want to hear about it so we can fix it.
Our verification levels
We mark offers with one of three verification levels, so you can see exactly how much checking sits behind each one:
- Checkout Verified — we’ve tested the code or deal in a real checkout and it worked.
- Merchant Verified — the offer is confirmed from the merchant or an affiliate source, but we haven’t run it through a checkout ourselves.
- Official-Site Verified — the offer is displayed on the merchant’s official website.
Most offers on CouponsDo are Official-Site Verified: we’ve seen the deal on the merchant’s own site and written it up from the merchant’s own words. Where we’ve gone further and tested something in a checkout, we say so — and where we haven’t, we don’t pretend otherwise. A deal that’s only ever appeared on third-party coupon sites, with nothing on the merchant’s own pages to back it up, doesn’t get published as verified here. At most, it’s a candidate for checkout testing, and it stays unpublished until it passes.
What we never publish
We never show success rates, “last used” times or report counts unless real user data exists behind them. Those numbers look reassuring, but on most coupon sites they’re made up — there’s no record of anyone actually using the code. We’d rather show nothing than show a figure we invented. The same goes for expiry dates and percentages: if the merchant doesn’t state one, we don’t guess one.
And we never publish fake codes. Some sites generate plausible-looking codes to fill a page. We don’t. If a merchant runs its discounts as deals on its own site rather than public codes — as Domino’s, KFC and McDonald’s do, for example — we list those deals as deals, with no code attached. An empty code field is honest; a made-up code is not.
What happens when an offer stops working
Offers change, expire and get pulled without warning, and no checking routine catches everything the same day. That’s why every store page shows when it was last checked, and why we act on reports from readers. If a code fails or a deal has disappeared, tell us through our Report a Coupon page and we’ll re-check it against the merchant’s site. If it’s dead, we mark it expired or take it down — we don’t leave dead offers showing as live. You can also read our Corrections page for how we handle mistakes, and our Editorial Policy for the rules our writers work to.
CouponsDo may earn a commission when you use a link on this site. That never changes the price you pay, and it never decides which offers we publish — a merchant can’t pay to have an unverified offer listed as verified. The checks above apply to every offer, paid or not.