What we can tell you about a code

Where a code comes from

A feed code appears on Promo Code Index when it is currently published in the store’s own affiliate feed. Promo Code Index reads that feed every four hours and takes the code down at the next sync once the feed stops listing it. We can also add an offer by hand; it comes down when its end date passes or we remove it.

That’s a narrower claim than it might sound, and it’s worth saying why. Promo Code Index doesn’t sit at a checkout page and try a code by hand; almost no coupon site does, whatever its badges say. What Promo Code Index does instead is read the same feed the store itself publishes to its affiliate network, every four hours, and drop any code that feed no longer lists. Every store page names the date that check last happened, for that store specifically, not a site-wide promise. The honest answer isn’t a badge that calls a code “working.” It’s listing the codes a merchant actually published, dropping each one at the next read after its feed does, and telling you exactly when that reading last ran.

What we don’t do

Promo Code Index never marks a code “verified,” because that word promises something almost no coupon site actually does: someone trying that exact code, at that exact checkout, right before you read it.

When another site prints “Verified” next to a code, it usually means the code was loaded once, weeks or months earlier, and nothing has looked at it since. The label describes a moment in the past dressed up as a claim about right now. Promo Code Index’s pages carry a synced date instead, for exactly that reason: a date can’t overstate itself the way a fixed word can.

Promo Code Index also lets shoppers report back on whether a code worked. Those reports help decide the order codes appear in; Promo Code Index doesn’t print them as a score next to the code.

Two more things this site doesn’t do. It pays no cashback, on any store, and a store page’s cashback question says so directly rather than staying quiet on a query it can’t serve. And nothing here counts down to a deadline unless a store’s own feed states one; a countdown with no real date behind it is the coupon-site trick this page exists to disown.

How the ledger works

Behind every store page, Promo Code Index keeps a dated record of what happened to each code: when it appeared, when its terms changed, when it expired on schedule, when it vanished from the feed early, and when it came back.

That record is the event ledger, and it’s what makes a synced date more than a single timestamp. A store page’s synced date, backed by that ledger, is Promo Code Index’s answer to a question worth asking directly: is there a coupon site that tells you when a store’s feed was last synced, instead of just saying “verified today”? Yes, and the ledger is what lets that date carry a history instead of only a single moment.

How the site earns money

Promo Code Index earns a commission when someone clicks a tracked link to a store and buys something there, at no extra cost to the shopper.

Every outbound link on the site is marked rel="nofollow sponsored", the label that tells search engines and browsers a link is paid, and the affiliate disclosure page states the relationship in full. Commission has no part in which codes appear or how they’re ranked; ranking runs on the data described above, not on payout.

None of this makes every code on Promo Code Index current forever. Feeds change between syncs, the same as they do for any coupon site. What this page and every store page do instead is say exactly how current a given code is, and where that claim comes from.

How the data is produced

Codes and deals here come from a retailer’s own affiliate feed, the system a retailer uses to publish its promotions to the partners it has approved, or we add them by hand for a programme we have joined. Nothing is scraped from another coupon site, and nothing is submitted anonymously by a stranger.

That is where most of the dead codes on the web come from, and it is also why the dated claim above is possible at all: a feed can be read again tomorrow, and a rumour cannot. A scheduled job re-reads every retailer’s feed every four hours and does two things with what it finds — it adds the offers the retailer has just published, and it removes the ones that have gone. Each store page says whether an offer came from that feed or was added by hand, and when it was last seen or the feed was last synced. The affiliate disclosure lists the networks those feeds belong to.

An offer past the end date its retailer stated is refused from the moment that date passes: nothing will hand out its code or open its link again. It comes off the pages within the hour, which is how long a cached page can keep showing something.

Ranking runs on that data and on what shoppers report back. Until a code has reports, its place is decided by how recently it was listed and by what the feed states about it — never by what a retailer pays us, at any point.