Description

000aCoupons can attract new customers and increase sales, but there's always the risk of becoming a target for fraud. Attorney Cliff Ennico discusses issues related to both online and offline coupons. 000a000a

Transcript

Hi, I’m Cliff Ennico, Legal editor of SBTV.com and author of the best selling book, “Small Business Survival Guide”, so you’ve got some terrific products and services on sale on your website and you’re looking for creative ways to generate buzz and drive traffic to your website. One thought that might have occurred to you is coupon promotions offering an online coupon that people can download and print on their computers and send to you along with some laptops and maybe some cash for a discount on some of your products and services. Coupon promotion is been around forever. It’s a very effective way to promote products and services especially in certain industry such as toys for example. But there are some rules and there are some ways you can get caught in a trap if you’re not careful. Your biggest risk whenever you’re doing coupon promotion is what we lawyers call, coupon fraud. That’s a situation where someone gets a hold of your coupon and makes a gazillion unauthorized copies of it and then submits it, usually from several addresses in an effort to get a huge reward but they’re not entitled to because they are not interested in buying your product and services. What they want is the cash redemption value of these things. There are some simple ways to prevent against coupon fraud but the things that you should make sure is printed on the face of every coupon that you send out to folks. Let’s start with some basics here. First of all, you should always have an expiration date on your coupon. Void after December 31 200-whatever. That limits your liability; it also limits the time in which people who are tempted to play coupon fraud type games. That’s number one. Number two; always put a barcode on your coupons. Specific type of barcode is required for internet coupons are called an EAN128 barcode. Your internet coupon vendor will know exactly what these are or you can just type that phrase in to search engine and you’ll see there’s at least a gazillion companies that offer for a very low cost to do these barcodes for you. Have something on each barcode that indicates who the customer is and makes it customer unique. That way you can tell if somebody is making fifty illegal downloads of your coupon at the same time. Try to see if you can track these things as much as you possibly can. There’s also a good thing to do from a marketing perspective to so you can tell who’s responding, what parts of the country, what demographics were in each group, that kind of thing. And then last but not the least make sure that you have a very low redemption value. You are required to state a cash value on coupons. Coupons do have cash value. I do see coupons that say no cash value, but cash value could be also very, very low, for example, $00,000.01. This means that if there’s someone out there who’s tempted to play coupon fraud games and they have access to very sophisticated technology where they can download millions of your coupons and avoid the internet coupon vendor’s encryption software. This person is going to have print out hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies of your coupon before they’ll even get one dollars worth of redemption out of you. They won’t be tempted to do that. Always remember when you do coupon promotions, the coupons are void if they are altered, transferred, sold or copied in any manner and your coupon should state that very clearly on the face of each coupon. Look at any online coupons and you’ll see their standard language that they all use is perfectly free to cut and paste that into your own coupon promotions. For more information on coupon promotions, there’s a wonderful website at www.couponorg.com. This is the website of the Association of Coupon Professionals with a million tips on the things that you can and should not put in your coupon promotions to make them more effective to you. I’m Cliff Ennico for SBTV.com