100 Big Coupons is a comprehensive directory of online shopping coupons. It has coupons for many top retailers in the United States, and its goal is to help online shoppers to save big.

Yet there are already many coupon sharing sites with similar goals, and what makes 100 Big Coupons different? From its about us page:

100 Big Coupons was launched with a few key concepts in mind. One is there are minimal banners and advertisements that will be found throughout our site. Another key concept in the design of 100 Big Coupons was to make the site as fast loading and easy to use as possible.

Looks like minimalistic design plus good usability are what it tries to differentiate itself. Is it so? How useful is the site? Any relevance to us the Down Under shoppers?

Banners and Advertisements

What impresses me about the site is its minimalistic design. No fancy over bloated image, no banner ads popped up from all corners — just a plain functional site. Loading its home page + all images and Javascript, according to the network analysis tool in FireBug, takes 4.57 sec from Sydney Australia, half the globe away from where 100 Big Coupons is hosted, Toronto in Canada. Not bad.

I can only find one banner ads at the top right hand corner, which means the rest of the site is dedicated to navigation elements and its main content. Thumbs up for that.

Finding Coupons

Let’s look at user accessibility here. After all, you do not come to a coupon listing site for its fast loading speed — you are coming here for the coupons! There are a few ways to locate the coupons. Here is their home page —

As you can see, online stores are listed on the left hand side alphabetically (although just a partial list), and on the right hand side in categories. A search function is implemented so you can find all stores that match a keyword. On the home page it also lists out all the recently added coupons.

There is also an RSS feed for the newest coupons and deals, however

• RSS feed is not advertised in the HTML header (using <link rel="alternate" ... />), so it is difficult for feed readers to automatically pick up the feeds.
• No date information in the feed items. In my opinion, published date information is very important for a coupons/deals site.

I guess I can be more forgiving here as RSS feed link has been marked as “beta”, but it is just something I think can be easily done and improved upon.

I have briefly counted on the full merchant listing page and it has coupons and deals for around 500 merchants. Actually might be less as some do not actually have any existing coupon nor deal associated with them. The number of coupons is actually a bit disappointing. Going to a big merchant like Buy.com reveals only 8 coupons and 11 deals, which you would have expected more.

From the home page you can also subscribe to their news letter for latest updates. A useful feature however, is the ability to subscribe only to a certain merchant. For example if I am only interested in Amazon’s offers, I can go to that page and subscribe to it. Alternatively you can go to their sign up page to subscribe only the merchants you are interested in.

Conclusion

Personally I found 100 Big Coupons a fast, easy-to-navigate site. However it was let down by the number of deals it has listed. Moreover, it is not that relevant to the readers of this blog. Unlike RetailMeNot, there is no category that is for the Australian merchants (although I’ve seen Canadian merchants all over the place). Nor does it provide instant community feedback like RetailMeNot, as you cannot see how each coupon is rated by other fellow shoppers.

At the same time, RetailMeNot was let down by its pool browsing interface (folkosonomy/tagging does not work in everything), whereas 100 Big Coupons is a far easier site to browse around.