earticle

영어

Most customers of shopping malls get a discount or a rebate with coupons. In order to promote merchandise consumption, businesses issue and distribute coupons. With the coupons, they increase sales by encouraging repeat purchases, by increasing product awareness, by attracting customers with a new product, or by encouraging customers to purchase a large quantity of an over-stocked product. As electronic devices evolved, electronic coupons appeared. Mobile coupons have been widely used and are replacing traditional paper coupons. Nowadays, smartphones with powerful computing capabilities, huge memory capacities, and various sensors are carried by almost everybody. Smart coupons are distributed via short message service, multimedia messaging services, peer-to-peer communications, and so on. Customers can save money with coupons while merchants maximize profits with them. Therefore, this paper reviews existing coupon systems and discusses the design of a smart coupon system.