coupconnect

So you bought a coupon for discounted car repair, or a haircut at the local salon, but it turns out you can’t use it? An app called CoupConnect aims to solve the problem — providing a secondary market for users to buy and sell daily deals.

CoupConnect, developed by Seattle-area entrepreneur Prateek Jetly, was originally launched as a way for users to track and aggregate their daily deals, by linking their Groupon, LivingSocial or AmazonLocal account, and those capabilities remain a core part of the app.

The marketplace was added as a new feature in a recent update. Apart from selling a daily deal they don’t plan to redeem, users can buy deals from the marketplace that they might have missed the first time around.

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But wait, aren’t those deals in someone else’s name? What happens if you buy them? As it turns out, deals actually rely on a voucher code to redeem, without the user’s name, and even in cases where a name is on the coupon — as with LivingSocial — merchants will still accept them, in practice, as long as the code is valid.

CoupConnect builds in protections for buyers, verifying that the sellers’ coupons exist in their CoupConnect accounts and are not marked as used or expired.

As an additional step, the app requires a coupon to be held for a period of time before it can be sold in the marketplace. CoupConnect takes a 10% fee on deals sold in the marketplace. (See the CoupConnect FAQ for more details.)

Among other features, the app includes a built-in mechanism for gifting coupons that you originally purchased yourself.

CoupConnect is a free app for the iPhone, available for download here.

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