Groupon - do you use it?

Must admit, the wowcher site appears to be riding the coat tails of the groupon style site popularity. Also baffled by how they have managed to get so much funding. Are they too late? Not convinced with the name, but guess time will tell.

Core audience though (or so it seems in the UK) is young female, who communicate to their peer groups via social networking, so guess thats why you see so many Spa days, hair dressers, cupcakes etc, and not socket sets, motorbike parts or other manly things


Have you looked at Huddlebuy? Just recently partnered with them and they are a good bunch. Not being going very long, but they are purely a B2B version of Groupon, so things like professional services seem to go down well.

Thanks Steve.

More happy customers
Like someone else said, I think it will only work with womens beauty products, having fitted out a few hairdressing salons, the retailer generally puts a huge mark up on the creams, potions and lotions and all the other so called 'magical beauty slap' women buy for eternal youth Probably the women who buy these vouchers have the work carried out by trainees, thereby keeping the costs down even more. I never knew that Groupon kept 50% of the voucher, so just by taking a stroll around a supermarket and looking at the cost of food, it stands to reason that no restaraunt is ever going to break even after all the other overheads have been taken into account. Seems like some businesses are using this scheme out of sheer desperation.

Was talking to another discount voucher site recently, who specialise in Restaurant and Attraction Promotions, and they take 100% of the voucher! The argument is, the money goes towards newspaper and other advertising mediums (which is why we were talking).

The restaurant that puts up the voucher receives nothing, but then tries to recoup by either upselling the customer while they are there, or in the hope that they enjoy themselves and return as paying guests.

The upshot is a nice full restaurant, downside is its a loss leader in the hope of repeat custom.

Seems a dangerous and alien strategy to me, but there seem to be plenty of restaurants that see this an acceptable form of marketing, especially in this current climate.

<deja vous post> just realized I said that earlier!

Hot off the press:

Groupon to be investigated by Office of Fair Trading
Advertising watchdog refers daily deals website after it was found to have broken UK ad regulations 48 times in 11 months

Groupon to be investigated by Office of Fair Trading | Media | guardian.co.uk

https://twitter.com/#!/search/groupon

Well, BBC News - Groupon reports unexpected loss will be interesting if they do turn this around.

Almost in danger of repeating myself, so instead I'll just requote myself from back in Novemeber!!!

We are looking at using groupon, we sell canvas prints and have heard rumours of other business selling 150 canvases in one day, however it caused problems as they were over run with the amount of business and received many complaints as they could not deliver, I have also heard stories of people losing money by not working out there profit margins correctly after discounts.

Yep they have been pretty well documented, so if you decide to go down the Groupon Route, really do your homework first and work out those numbers.

No point getting inuandated with orders you can't deliver, at a price you can't afford! Too many people have been swept along with the illusion of high volume sales, which ends in a loss of reputation and financial chaos, or worse

Yep the upsale. With the face that Groupon and other similar companies are daily deal services there isn't really any incentive for consumers to return to the same restaurant (or spa or whatever) when there are not doing a deal cause they can wait for another Groupon deal.

Like MRB said the model is easily copied but don't think that's the only problem. Another problem is that their model doesn't seem to encourage customer retension. If Groupon takes quite a big slice of the pie and clients don't really see much in the way of return or repeat business from some of these new customers then there not likely to run another Groupon deal.

Yeah I have been looking in to it and I know you can limit the amount of offers you sell, however I think people just get greedy and try to sell more than they can handle.

I have been looking at comments from people that have used it, and they say, most people cash there vouchers in the first and last day the offer is valid, the period in between is quite quiet.

It also recommends you stock something like 4x the amount you normally stock, so it must work.