How we check codes

This page describes what actually happens to an offer between a retailer publishing it and you reading it here. It is a modest process rather than a heroic one, and we would rather set it out plainly than decorate the site with a badge nobody could earn.

Where the entries come from

Every offer on CheerFinds arrives from a retailer’s own affiliate programme feed — the promotion the shop itself published to the network it works with, carrying the shop’s own title, description, conditions, start date and end date. We do not copy codes off other coupon sites, we do not buy lists, and we do not run a robot that guesses at combinations of letters until one is accepted.

What is thrown away before anything is published

• Anything already finished. If the end date has passed, the entry never enters the index in the first place.
• Anything not for you. Promotions the retailer has not marked as available to shoppers in the United States are dropped, as is anything priced in a currency other than the dollar — a discount quoted in pounds, euros, baht or rand is of no use at a US checkout and only misleads.
• Anything not in English. Feeds are international; the index is not.
• Placeholder conditions. Feeds are full of terms fields reading “n/a”, “-” or “see site”. Those are deleted rather than reprinted as though they meant something.
• Masked codes. Some feeds carry a code written as asterisks. Where that happens the entry is either republished as an offer needing no code, or not republished at all. We never invent the missing characters.
• Whole categories we will not carry. Vaping and tobacco, cannabis and CBD, adult products, gambling, weapons, prescription medicine and high-cost credit are screened out at the shop level and then swept for again, by keyword, across every name, domain, title, description and terms field before publication.

What a person does

What survives the screens is read. We check that the headline discount matches what the description actually promises, that a condition mentioned in the small print is lifted into the visible terms row, that the shop’s name is the brand a shopper would recognise rather than a factory or holding-company string from the feed, and that the destination link points at the retailer we say it does.

What happens afterwards

An entry is not finished when it is published. Each night the site walks the whole index:

• Offers whose end date has passed are pulled out of every live list, count, department and search result that morning.
• They then appear only on their own shop’s page, inside a block headed “recently expired”, struck through, with the date they stopped and the code control replaced by a plain statement that it no longer works.
• Three weeks after that they are unpublished entirely.
• Any entry that has left the retailer’s feed altogether is removed on the next refresh, rather than left standing with nothing behind it.

Why we do not say “verified today”

To verify a code properly you have to complete a purchase with it. Nobody is buying several hundred things every morning, and any site that implies otherwise is describing something that did not happen. What we can honestly claim is this: a person read it, the conditions printed are the conditions the retailer gave, the end date is the retailer’s own, and if that date passes the entry leaves the same day.

Your part in it

A reader at a checkout learns something no feed can tell us. If a code here was refused while the entry still says it is live, say so. We look at it the same working day: if the promotion has quietly ended, the entry comes down; if it was a condition we had not printed clearly enough, we rewrite it.