Forget clipping, how about clicking coupons?

Forget the stereotype of the coupon-clipper as a penny-pinching old lady snipping bargains out of the Sunday paper. The new crop of coupon clippers is young, affluent and wired. And Web sites offering coupons are increasingly becoming one of the most popular shopping categories on the Internet.
    Virtual coupon Web sites offer consumers free deals they can clip and print for both online and bricks-and-mortar stores in a wide variety of products, including national retailers, entertainment services, travel providers, restaurant chains-even coupons for local grocery stores. Consumers are paying attention; Valupage.com was the sixth most-visited Web site for April 1999, according to Media Metrix Inc., an Internet traffic monitoring company.
    Virtual coupon use has grown enormously in the past year, according to James McQuivey, senior analyst of online retail strategies at Boston-based Forrester Reseach. He estimates that the top three online coupon sites--E-centives.com, Coolsavings.com and Valupage.com--are visited by a combined total of three million households each year. With the number of households shopping online at around 10 million, that's not bad for an industry that didn't exist one year ago.
    Online coupons are catching on for obvious reasons: everyone likes to save money. What is changing is the notion of who uses coupons: the old idea of an economically disadvantaged person doesn't reflect reality. "There are a lot of value-focused people who use the Internet. These are people who want to know that they are getting a fair price," McQuivey says.
    One great advantage of virtual coupons over paper ones is their ability to meet customer's specific interests. In the Sunday paper, for example, you might go through page after page of coupons for products you have no interest in before finding one you want. Online, that isn't the case.
    When you register at the coupon sites, you enter your name and lifestyle information. Only coupons that meet you specific interests are brought to you. Don't have children? You won't have to bother with coupons from Pampers. And many sites offer a privacy guarantee, so advertisers can target shoppers without having access to their names, streets or e-mail addresses.
    The four basic categories of online coupons are coupons for grocery stores, (Valupage.com), coupons used offline, in bricks-and-mortar stores, (Coolsavings.com); coupons for Internet stores (E-centives.com); and coupons for local merchants (Valuepak.com, which is the online version of what you get in the mail).
    These categories allow for a wide variety of stores. Coolsavings.com features coupons from more than 60 different retailers, including Kmart, J.C. Penny, Chuck E. Cheese Pizza, Toys 'R Us, Disney and Chrysler.
    And the average online coupon user is a merchandiser's dream. According to Coolsavings.com, the user is young--average age is 31-- and slightly more likely to be female (54% female, 46% male). They tend to be homeowners and have an average yearly income of $51,000.