How we check discount codes

1. No code is scraped from the web by hand

The codes here are not copied from other coupon sites or found on social media. They come from the affiliate platforms the site is signed up with, and on those platforms the shop itself uploads them, together with validity dates and conditions.

The difference matters: a code copied from somewhere is a code you know nothing about — who posted it, when, whether it was ever public. A code uploaded by the shop has a sender and a stated expiry.

2. Codes the shop forbids publishing stay unpublished

Some campaigns state explicitly that the code may not be shown publicly: codes reserved, say, for a newsletter or a single partner. One of the platforms passes that flag along with the promotion.

Those codes are dropped before they ever reach a page. That is not generosity: publishing them would get the affiliate account closed, and it would hand readers a code that gets refused at the till.

3. The catalogue realigns itself all day

The list of promotions is requested from the platforms and rebuilt every hour, with a scheduled refresh even during the hours nobody visits. An offer the shop has withdrawn disappears within that cycle; a new one appears with the same delay.

If a platform fails to answer — it happens — we do not empty the section: we keep serving the last valid response and flag internally that the data is stale. A catalogue halved by someone else's outage would only hurt the reader.

4. Expiry dates are the stated ones, and they are visible

Where the shop gives an end date, the page shows it and a countdown makes it readable at a glance. Expired offers drop out of the list.

Many promotions arrive with no date at all: they stay valid until the shop withdraws them. In that case we do not invent an expiry to manufacture urgency — that is the most common trick in this business, and it exists only to make people buy in a hurry.

5. The code hidden in the title

Plenty of shops write the code inside the promotion title and leave the dedicated field empty ("Extra 15% Off | Use Code HOORAY15"). We do recover those, but under a cautious rule: it only fires when the text explicitly says that word is the code.

That is a deliberate trade-off. A greedier rule would catch a few more codes, but it would also mistake collection names for codes — and an invented code is worse than a missing one.

6. Readers are the last check

Under every offer there are two thumbs. They are not a satisfaction poll: they say whether the code worked. Negative reports feed into the order offers appear in, so the ones that stop working sink on their own before the shop even pulls them.

On each shop page you can also leave a review, which stays public under your name.

What we cannot promise

We do not test every code against every basket: no site can, and anyone stamping "verified today" on hundreds of offers a day is claiming something they did not do.

Three things stay outside our control, and they are also the most frequent reasons a code is refused: a shop can end a campaign early without updating the platform; many promotions carry exclusions not stated in the text (already-discounted items, certain brands, a minimum spend); and some codes are capped at a number of uses that runs out.

If a code fails, the guide "Your discount code is not working" lists the real causes in order of frequency, and what can still be done about each.