Retail sales customer marketing system with electronic coupon processing

A method of promoting sales of products to consumers at a point-of-transaction site, comprising the steps of:

• a) generating an electronic shopping list of the products to be purchased by a consumer by delivering a reader operable for electro-optically reading machine-readable indicia to the consumer, and by instructing the consumer to manually hold and aim the reader at the indicia identifying the products to be purchased, and to manually operate the reader to obtain product data corresponding to the products while manually holding the reader at a location remote from the point-of-transaction site;
• b) transferring the shopping list to a computer on a network on which a database having coupon data is accessible and retrievable by the computer;
• c) matching the coupon data an the product data, and retrieving the coupon data from the database that matches the product data transferred to the computer;
• d) printing paper coupons from the retrieved coupon data;
• and
• e) delivering the paper coupons to the consumer for redemption at the point-of-transaction site.