Coupons and Cash Back FatWallet featured a "
Coupons" section where users could find discounts from online retailers. Before being acquired, FatWallet also featured its own "
Cash Back" rebate shopping section, in which members received back a percentage of purchases made through
referral links to partnered retailers. FatWallet has since ended the cash back program and now directs its members to the program offered by Rakuten.
Forums FatWallet users posted the sale prices of major retailers, often before they were officially released in retailers' advertisements, which involved the site in a legal dispute in 2002 involving
Black Friday advertisements. Several retailers, including
Walmart,
Target,
Best Buy and
Staples, have served FatWallet with
"take-down" notices pursuant to the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, claiming that their sale prices were
copyrighted and must be removed from the FatWallet site. In addition, Wal-Mart served FatWallet with a
subpoena to reveal the identity of the users who had posted Wal-Mart's prices, but the demand was later dropped. Although FatWallet initially complied with the take-down notices due to the fear of liability, within two weeks it reposted the prices and argued that the prices were facts rather than expression, and therefore not subject to copyright. FatWallet filed a lawsuit in the
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against three of the retailers, seeking damages for knowing assertion of invalid copyright claims and a
declaratory judgment that the take-down provisions of the DMCA were
unconstitutional. The case,
FatWallet, Inc. v. Best Buy Enterprise Services, Inc., was dismissed. The court ruled that FatWallet lacked
standing to sue for any harm done to its users for having their postings temporarily removed, and FatWallet did not assert any injury to itself that the court found cognizable. Since its launch, FatWallet has expanded its forums to include discussion on other financial topics such as investments, banking and credit cards. The Finance forum has been mentioned in
The Wall Street Journal and
The New York Times referencing personal finance topics including on credit cards and
401(k) investment tips. FatWallet launched "Best Deals" in 2009 (initially called "Today's Top Deals"), which features researched deals found on the internet by staff and members. Best Deals also features an "Expert Picks" section where staff research bigger ticket retail products like laptops, computers and HDTVs for the best value for the price, and post their endorsements each week. ==Relocation==