How we check codes

This page describes what actually happens between a retailer publishing an offer and that offer appearing on reviewtal.com. It is deliberately unglamorous. If a claim is not on this page, we are not making it.

1. Where the offers come from

Two places, and only two. The first is the merchant feed a retailer publishes through its affiliate network — the same feed the retailer’s own marketing team maintains. The second is a retailer’s own public campaign page. Nothing here is copied off another coupon site, and nothing is generated to fill a gap.

2. The screen at the door

An offer is dropped before anybody reads it if it fails any of these:

it is not open to shoppers in the United States, or its price is set in a currency other than US dollars;
its title is not in English;
its end date has already passed;
the retailer belongs to a trade this board does not carry — vaping, tobacco, cannabis and CBD, adult, gambling, weapons, prescription medicine or high-cost credit;
the “code” is a masked placeholder rather than a real string, in which case it is either filed as an offer needing no code or dropped.

3. The read-through

What survives is read by a person. That person:

rewrites the headline so it says what the offer does, and strips the shouting, the emoji and the retailer’s own campaign codenames;
pulls the conditions out of the terms field and sets them on the front of the card — minimum spend, new customers only, one use per customer, excluded ranges;
keeps the retailer’s own end date exactly as filed, and marks the card “No end date given” when the feed genuinely has none rather than guessing;
treats a placeholder date years in the future as “no end date” rather than pretending it is a deadline;
discards the offer entirely if the wording cannot be made honest.

4. What happens to the date

The end date is not decoration. The board acts on it:

on the day an offer ends it leaves every list, every count and every carousel on the site;
for the next three weeks it sits on its store page in a block headed “Ran out recently”, clearly marked as finished, so nobody has to wonder whether it was ever there;
it carries a noindex tag while it sits there, so search engines do not serve it as if it were live;
after three weeks it is unpublished altogether.

5. What we do not claim

We do not say every code was tested this morning, because it was not. We do not say a code is guaranteed, because no publisher can guarantee another company’s checkout. We do not publish success rates, ratings, shopper counts or testimonials, because we have no honest way to measure any of them. A code can be refused for reasons invisible from here: a basket below the threshold, a product in an excluded range, a usage cap reached, or a retailer quietly switching the promotion off.

6. What to do when a code fails

Check the end date and the conditions on the card first — most refusals are explained by one or the other. If the card is live and the code still failed, tell us. The card comes off the board while it is checked; if the retailer has withdrawn the promotion, it stays off.

7. The numbers on this site

Every count printed anywhere on reviewtal.com — the store total, the live offer total, the number of codes, the number ending this week, the per-level counts — is computed in PHP from what is actually published at the moment the page loads. None of them is typed into a template, and expired offers are excluded from all of them.