The DealRadar pipeline
Every coupon you see on this site moves through a four-stage pipeline before it reaches your screen. The pipeline runs continuously, twenty-four hours a day, and recycles offers as they expire. It is the single most important reason our success rates stay above 95% on the majority of codes we publish.
Stage 1 — Ingestion
Codes enter the system from four sources: (1) the official newsletter and loyalty-app feed of each grocery chain we track, (2) manufacturer rebate programs that work across multiple chains, (3) community submissions from readers who saw a code work at checkout, and (4) verified affiliate networks. Every incoming code is timestamped, attributed to its source, and assigned to a retailer page.
Stage 2 — Automated testing
Once a code is ingested, our cart-simulator runs it through the retailer's online checkout flow. We add a representative basket of grocery items, apply the code at the promo-code field, and confirm whether the discount lands on the subtotal. Codes that fail the cart-simulator step never get published. Codes that pass move to Stage 3.
Stage 3 — Community verification
When you successfully use a code at checkout and tap the "It worked" button on the coupon page, your vote feeds the success-rate calculation displayed next to the offer. If the success rate drops below 50% on more than a handful of recent uses, the code is automatically demoted in the rankings or pulled from the page.
Stage 4 — Re-ranking
Every retailer page is re-ranked daily based on the freshest verification data. Codes verified within the last 24 hours appear first; codes that have not been verified in two weeks drop to the bottom; codes that fail community votes are removed entirely. The result: the deal at the top of every retailer page is, statistically, your best shot at a working discount.
How we calculate "saved" totals
The dollar amount displayed on each retailer page (" saved by community") is calculated from the discount value of every successfully-applied code on that page, multiplied by the number of community-confirmed uses. It is a conservative estimate — we do not include savings from unsubmitted votes — but it gives you a real-world sense of how active the savings community is at each chain.