Adam sent me his website 2 weeks ago and asked me to take a look. Sorry I only had a chance to write about it this week. Worse, it has been sitting in the draft tray for almost the entire week because I wass sick… Anyway.

Click and Save.com.au is yet-another local business directory that provides coupons that can either be printed out or SMS to your phone. It is in some sense similar to Save as You Spend, which I looked at 4 months ago. Merchants sign up with the website and offer printable coupons online. Visitors can then browse or search for these coupons. Visitors can either search by location (city/state) or by categories. Once you have found the merchant, you can either print the coupon out, send coupon via SMS, or “add to basket” (which is a weird concept for coupons).

What differentiates Click and Save from saus.com.au is its Coupon Map, where you can see where the coupons are on a map, powered by Google Maps and its Australian geocoding service.

Now. How useful currently is ClickAndSave.com.au? Not much — yet. With only 21 local coupon offers under All Categories, moreover some are actually expired, there is really nothing to be excited about. While integrating with mapping service is refreshing, neither is it anything new — big local directory players in Australia like dLook and TrueLocal have long been integrating those Web 2.0’ish maps into their business directory service (YellowPages is still using the ancient WhereIs interface though).

I guess for a bargain hunter, that means a “pass” for Click and Save for now, as you might spend quite a bit of time clicking through the links but can’t find anything valuable that can give you some saving.

How does this site monetise then? If you are a merchant seeking more exposure, you might wish to check out their advertise page. It says, “Advertising on Click and Save is Free and Easy!” however at the bottom of the page it says “Start Advertising today! 3 month free trial!”

Now, is putting your business on Click and Save free or not? Common understanding is, free trial does not equal to free, and as a business owner you still need to pay to be listed after the free trial — for a not-publicly disclosed amount as I cannot find the rate anywhere on the website. I would imagine that the cost is much less than other local business directories would charge, but what ROI should you expect when there’s hardly any traffic according to Alexa?

Any other good coupon/bargain-centric local business directory out there?

Update: According to Adam that they have only been in operation for 5 weeks, and they are expecting more business to sign up. I think it would be a good idea to come back to Click and Save in a few months time.