Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
The consumers were being told: You will never pay full price again. The merchants were hearing: You are going to get new customers who will stick around and pay full price. Disappointment was inevitable. David Streitfel of The NY Times on the increasingly visible issues around Coupon Discount sites. Here comes the press questions and backlash, and I’m not sure the business models are going to survive.
Wall Street Journal: Nearly one-third of all daily-deal sites nationwide—or 170 of 530—have shut down or been sold so far this year.
A fascinating study on what GroupOn does for the Yelp review score of a business: But their most controversial finding is that a Groupon deal seems to have an adverse impact on reputation as measured by Yelp ratings. Their analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases signifificantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are about 10% lower than scores of their peers. It’s not a perfect correlation – I don’t think that the self-selecting Yelp reviewers can be directly mapped to overall reputation (anyone got a link to relevant papers) but
Very rough statistics, acknowledged in the article, but the upper and lower bounds are from 20% to 70% return after spending a voucher somewhere. Split the difference and you get a 45% return rate. Now, is that enough?
[David Grey] is releasing his album exclusively on Groupon, beginning Monday, June 27, for only $6, more than half off the $13 retail price. …because the coupon sites, including Groupon are advertising networks and not some holy grail of lead generation with no downside for the businesses involved. Pay attention at the back.
Now that Groupon has created enough headlines about turnover and business models, everyone and their web-monkey are jumping on the "daily deal / voucher" business model as the next big thing online. Which is probably going to be a good thing for the businesses as they’ll be able to play the various voucher sales teams off each other and get a better deal for them while still attracting customers. It’s likely to make it a lot more cut-throat for the voucher companies though. And the big sign that there’s an overstocked inventory of voucher around the internet? You start getting
