# Transforming Retail Savings: The Innovative Power of Target's Cartwheel Program

> Discover how Target's Cartwheel program simplifies savings and enhances your shopping experience. Join now and enjoy exclusive discounts!

Published: 2013-10-15 · Updated: 2026-06-23 · Topics: Consumer Goods, Enterprise, Retail, Startup · Author: Alan Wizemann

Target's Cartwheel is a unique way to save on the products that you buy every day at Target. Using either the website or mobile applications, you can browse hundreds of offers on products in almost every category and add them to your personal list. When you are in a Target store, you simply scan a single barcode available in the application or printed out from the website and receive all the discounts at once. There are many other features that make saving fun and entertaining, including the ability to socially connect the application to see and compare your total savings with your friends, earn and unlock more slots on your list to save on even more items, and a fast scanning feature to quickly check if something is on Cartwheel with an available discount.

Several people within Target and Facebook created the idea behind Cartwheel, originally called Social Savings. Although I was part of some of the original conversations around its genesis, I didn't run the project until I was brought in by Target's senior leadership to help the program by reorganizing a portion of the team into a startup-like group, to rethink the way it was being built, the features that were needed and how it could rapidly adapt and iterate based on our guests' (users') feedback.

Cartwheel solves several key problems that were faced by our guests and retail in general. The first, and possibly largest, is the hassle of collecting coupons. The second is using all those collected coupons at the time of purchase. The third was around limits and how often a coupon could be used (usually once, on one item). Cartwheel allows you to save on multiple items on each transaction and also multiple times per day. When you look at these together, Cartwheel delivered something never before offered in retail, in an easy to use digital experience that worked flawlessly in physical stores.

I get asked from time to time whether I actually shop anywhere else, and of course I do. My family and I shop regularly at several other retailers and are avid users of eCommerce sites, are Prime members on Amazon and enjoy several subscription services from Diapers.com, BirchBox and BespokePost. There is a saying I really like, that "if Target doesn't have it, you don't need it," and although I like that quote, I actually think Target is changing from a more Mass Retailer into a highly specialized retailer that focuses on selling what it is good at, en masse. There are already other retailers out there, namely Amazon, that want to sell everything (I've recently read that Amazon has over 1 billion product skus globally). At that level, no one can compete on a sku by sku basis and has to focus. Target in this case is very powerful, as it has a very unique design-first approach to many product categories that it is known for. I think once things shake out with their new signature category focus, that quote will become true again – because their products will lead the category and won't really be available anywhere else, and that is exactly the kind of guest relationship a program like Cartwheel was built to reward.

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