Tired of dead coupon codes, I made Muse test them before checkout.

The problem

I kept paying full price online, or wasting time trying dead codes from coupon sites. Most coupon sites list codes nobody has verified, so you find out they are expired at the worst moment, mid-checkout. I wanted my assistant to do that work instead: check for codes before I choose a store, check again before I pay, actually test the codes in the cart, and give me one final total I can trust instead of a list of maybes. It is useful for any non-grocery purchase, especially bigger ones where a working code is real money.

Before you start

• A Muse assistant that can install skills and browse the web
• The McClipFace skill from mcclipface.com
• A purchase in mind

Steps

1. Tell your Muse: "Install the McClipFace skill from mcclipface.com and use it for all my shopping from now on."
2. Give it these standing rules: Never complete a purchase without my explicit pick and a thumbs-up on the total. Compare options by final total, meaning price plus shipping, tax, and fees. If a code has not been tested at checkout, label it "not tested yet" and do not claim a saving for it. If a store returns no offers, that means the feed has no data for that store, not that no coupons exist, so search the web for current codes instead.
3. Ask Muse to find what you want to buy. It looks up coupons and deals for the product and the stores selling it before recommending where to buy.
4. Once you have picked an item, tell Muse to check for codes again right before checkout. Codes appear and expire constantly, so the second look matters.
5. Give Muse permission to test the codes in the cart. A code from any feed is a candidate, not a fact, until checkout accepts it.
6. Review the results: best pick first with the final total and the original price, plus up to 5 ranked options. Approve one, and only then does anything get bought.

The result

It works the way I wanted: I get one verified total instead of a pile of maybes. Things that did not work, honestly: feed codes still die at checkout sometimes, which is why rule 4 exists. Some stores return zero offers because the feed does not cover them yet, so the web-search fallback in rule 7 does real work. And the assistant cannot buy on Amazon, which blocks its own agent, so Amazon purchases still happen in my own app.