Couponing for beginners: where to start

Don’t try to cover every store in town. Pick one or two places where you already buy groceries or household basics. You’ll learn their coupon pages, their rules and their weekly ad much faster, and you won’t spend extra trips chasing coupons.

Then check whether each store has digital coupons. Most large grocery and pharmacy chains do, on their own website and app.

Digital coupons belong to an account, so this step comes first. Hannaford says you must have a Hannaford online account to use digital coupons, and Walgreens says you need a myWalgreens account. At Meijer, every meijer.com account includes mPerks, its digital coupons and rewards program.

Joining is usually free. Publix, for example, says there is no charge to join Club Publix or to use digital coupons.

Sign up with the phone number you’ll give at the register. Many stores look you up by phone number at checkout, and the coupons only come off if they’re on that account.

• Store coupons are offered by the store. Manufacturer coupons are offered by the brand that makes the product. Digital coupons can be either. Raley’s, for example, has Something Extra offers (its personalized coupons) and More Coupons (savings offered by manufacturers), and both have to be clipped.
• Personalized offers are picked for your account. Raley’s says its Personalized Offers load to your account every other week.
• Cash back offers sit alongside coupons at some stores, with their own rules. Kroger says Digital Coupons and Cash Back Offers can’t be combined, and are limited to one per item.
• Paper coupons still exist, and they’re optional. If you use them, check how your store handles paper and digital coupons for the same item. At Publix and H-E-B, the paper coupon is used and the digital one stays on your account.

A digital coupon only comes off if it’s on your account before you buy the item. The for U FAQ on Vons, Andronico’s, Kings and Balducci’s says to add offers before shopping in store or online.

Most coupons work straight away. Kroger says digital coupons are available as soon as you load them, and Hannaford says they’re typically available within a few minutes. Load them at home, not in the checkout line.

For a closer look at loading, limits and checkout, see How digital coupons work.

1. Load new coupons. Stores add coupons all the time (Publix says new coupons can be added at any time), so check your stores once a week.
2. Write your shopping list first. Then look for coupons on the things you already need.
3. Check the weekly ad. An item that’s on sale and also has a coupon on your account is the best buy of the week. Our guide to stacking coupons with sales explains how the two combine.
4. Read each offer. Brand, size, variety and quantity all matter.
5. Identify yourself at checkout. Card, app or phone number, whatever your store uses.
6. Check your receipt. Kroger shows the discount under the item as “ecpn”, and Publix itemizes your savings on the receipt. If a coupon didn’t come off, take the receipt to customer service.

• Buying something just because there’s a coupon. A coupon only saves you money on something you were going to buy anyway.
• Buying the wrong size or variety. The offer says exactly what qualifies. H-E-B says each digital coupon shows its own redemption limits, and Meijer says its coupons exclude travel and trial size products.
• Letting coupons expire. Every coupon shows an end date. Walgreens coupons, for example, expire at 11:59 p.m. in the time zone of the store where you redeem them.
• Unclipping without checking the rules. Walgreens warns that once a coupon is unclipped, it can no longer be clipped.
• Expecting two coupons on one item. Many stores allow one. H-E-B, for example, accepts only one coupon, digital or paper, per qualifying item.
• Forgetting your store’s coupon limit. Some stores cap how many coupons you can hold at once. Kroger caps how many Cash Back Offers and Digital Coupons your household can hold at once, and Meijer allows 160 clipped coupons at one time. Others don’t: asked whether there’s a limit on the number of coupons you can clip, Publix answers “No.”

Loading coupons is the slow part: a store’s coupon page can have a long list of offers, each with its own button. OttoClipper is a Chrome extension, with a free plan, that presses those buttons for you on the store’s own website, at 100+ stores. We never see your store passwords. You sign in on the store’s own site, like always. On the free plan, a free account clips 4 stores a day. It only loads the coupons: the store’s rules, and the routine above, still apply. For what it does and doesn’t do, see What automatic coupon clipping is.