About Pinpoint Data's Services

 

What is CouponChek™?
CouponChek™ is an online service that uses patent-pending technology to help manufacturers reduce or eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars in coupon misredemption costs and retailer fines each year. Using Pinpoint Data's CouponChek™, users can scan a barcode during the production process and instantly verify the barcode's readability and content. CouponChek™ supports UPC-A/GS1-128, GS1-99/GS1-128, GS1 DataBar Interim and GS1 DataBar Final coupon barcodes.

Why use CouponChek™?
One easy step protects manufacturers from expensive, but all-too-common coupon promotions costs. CouponChek's simple, inexpensive process offers valuable benefits throughout the coupon cycle, from creation to redemption, for production, marketing, product management, finance and clearinghouse organizations. The complexity and minimal human-readable elements of GS1 DataBar coupon codes only magnify the value CouponChek™ presents.

Verifies Coupon Barcode Production to Eliminate "Bad" Scans
It's estimated that 7% of coupons are "bad" - in a $6B industry, that's over $400,000,000 worth of coupons that can be misredeemed or result in fines to the manufacturer.

What's a "bad" scan?

The coupon can't be read at all, because the barcode is improperly produced.

The coupon is readable, but contains data in an incorrect or non-standard coupon format that cannot be interpreted by point-of-sale scan processing programs (out of order or missing data elements).

The coupon is readable and contains the proper data elements in an acceptable format, but contains incorrect data elements that do not match the coupon artwork.

What happens when a coupon with a bad scan is distributed?
When a retailer encounters a "bad" scan, the manufacturer can be fined. This can be in excess of tens of thousands of dollars per mistake! And even if the barcode can be scanned, expensive costs can still result. These can range from misreporting, such as bad offer codes, to calculable losses for wrong values, wrong expiration dates or incorrect or unintended products. Worse, these errors may not be discovered until well into the redemption cycle after thousands of dollars have already been mistakenly redeemed.

How does CouponChek™ reduce the likelihood of a "bad" scan to save manufacturers the costs of fines and misredemption?
The CouponChek™ process...

Checks that the barcode is readable

Checks that the data stored in the barcode is in an acceptable coupon format

Checks that the data elements within the barcode contain valid GS1-US codes

Produces a Verification Report indicating exactly how a coupon will redeem at POS, including product(s), value and expiration.

Consolidates Manufacturers' Offer History for Comprehensive Reporting and Analysis
CouponChek™ acts as a central repository for all the coupon offers created for a manufacturer - whether in-house or out of house. This information can be retrieved by authorized users in real time for numerous benefits and gains:

Finance & Accounting
Prompt reporting of pending offers improves promotions budgeting and forecasting and can reduce extra clearinghouse charges by supplying coupon data before the first redemption is processed.

Production - In-house and Outside
Both in- and out-of-house production teams can benefit from CouponChek's usage history for quality control monitoring and activity tracking.

Clearinghouse
Reducing the occurrences of bad scans at production means fewer stops in the clearinghouse process. And, by regularly receiving the scan data, clearinghouses will reduce cost and time expenditures for processing new/unknown coupons, and be able to anticipate upcoming fulfillment needs and improve scheduling and planning.

Provides One-Stop Resource for Coupon Barcode Production and New Product Registration
The elements within coupon and product barcodes - Company Prefixes, value codes, product codes -- are each determined separately, in independent processes by multiple organizations. To verify a read code manually would mean a series of contacts and lost time. CouponChek™ gives users instant access to the most current data available for use at POS to:

Search for Company Prefix and product ID's, by name or number

Look up Coupon Code guidelines and standards

Verify new product postings to central industry database

Pays for Itself
A single offer corrected can pay for an entire year of CouponChek™ scans!


How does my company start using CouponChek™?
Contact Pinpoint Data at (908) 756-9400 for details.