Are coupon sites safe to use?

Most are safe in the sense that matters — you buy from the retailer, not from them, so your card details never touch the coupon site. The real risks are wasted time on dead codes, browser extensions with more access than they need, and claims about testing that nobody could actually be doing.

How these sites make money

When you follow a link and buy, the retailer pays a commission out of their margin. Your price is unchanged. That model is fine, and it is disclosed here on our affiliate disclosure page, but it creates two incentives worth knowing about: a reason to keep you clicking out, and a reason to favour retailers who pay more.

Six things worth checking

• Is the affiliate relationship disclosed? It is a legal requirement in most markets and the easiest thing to look for. No disclosure means nothing else on the site has been thought about either.
• Does it claim to test every code? Treat this sceptically. Testing a code means building a real basket at a real shop; doing that across thousands of offers, repeatedly, is not something a small site can do. Sites claiming it almost universally are not.
• Where do the offers come from? A site that says “from the retailers' own feeds” is telling you something checkable. A site that says nothing is usually scraping other coupon sites.
• Are dead codes removed or admitted? Either is fine. What is not fine is a page full of expired offers presented as live.
• Does the browser extension ask for everything? Extensions that apply codes automatically need broad permissions by nature. That is a real trade and worth making deliberately.
• Is there a way to report a bad code? A site with no feedback route has no way of finding out it is wrong.

What we do and do not do here

Offers on this site come from each retailer's own feed through an affiliate network, imported as the retailer wrote them and read again daily. We do not take codes to a checkout ourselves, and we say so rather than implying otherwise. The votes under each offer are the only signal here that can warn you a code has stopped working — which is why the vote count sits beside the rate rather than the rate alone.

The full account is on where our offers come from, and what happens to your data is on the privacy page.

The one genuine risk

Not the coupon site — the fake retailer. A code for a shop you have never heard of, at a price well under everyone else, is the pattern worth being careful about. Check the retailer, not the coupon site, before entering a card.