Published July 29th, 2007
in Money Saving Tools.
Valpak, the coupons site which rank keeps falling in my monthly list, is all ready for an upgrade scheduled for August 5. The new look features improved navigation (some using AJAX) and integrated Google maps displaying merchants offering coupons in your area. The coupons in the list are sorted by distance to your location and you can browse them all or filter by category using tabs at the top.
As of today, Valpak.com still links to the old website but you can preview the new one using this link. I have given it a test drive today. There are certainly some bugs to work around, for example directions link didn’t always work and when it did it didn’t show starting location correctly. Overall however the new look is certainly an improvement.
One question I have to the Valpak people is why hide the merchant phone number behind a click? Is this some sort of spam protection? Also, a suggestion. It would be nice to add a progress bar when the list of merchants is updated after I click on the category tab. Without any indication of what is happening, it is very easy to decide that the tabs are broken.
Old design
New design
Published November 3rd, 2006
in Money Saving Tips and Shopping Coupons.
I don’t know about you but I receive a ton of coupons in mail from local businesses — grocery stores, pizzerias and restaurants. A lot of coupons come in thick envelopes from distributors like ValPak and MoneyMailer.
I used to go through them selecting the ones I could potentially use, clipping them, and pinning them to the kitchen wall.
I should confess, I am not very organized as far as planning our family time goes and I usually do not know where we are going to eat out next weekend. Besides we like to try new things and so we seldom go to the same place several times.
As the result by the end of the month the kitchen wall would usually be full of coupons that I either didn’t use or couldn’t find on the wall when needed. Eventually I would toss them all in the trash since most of them would have already expired.
Lately I stopped doing this. I started consciously ignoring the ValPak envelopes as I saw them in mail despite my understanding that I could be saving money with them. The entire process was just too inefficient.
Thanks to the the partnership that ValPak signed with Google last September I now don’t have to stack the coupons I receive in mail but rather can get them online at the very time I need them. To do so I go to Google Maps using this special link, type in the name of the business (in my example I typed pizza), my ZIP code and viola — I get a listing of matching merchants with the links to coupons they offer.
Not all merchants offer coupons but many do (e.g. my ‘pizza’ search came back with every single pizzeria in my area offering them).
When I click on the “Coupons” link I get a form like this that I print out and take with me — no pins on the wall and no worrying that the coupon has expired!
I hope this little tip will help you save time and money as it has helped me.
