91–100 of 130 posts
Doesn't change that her loyal customer (Lucinda) is out $6, and Lucinda is very likely to find a new place that knows how to serve up, "Thanks for your patronage, we'll do our best to keep you coming..."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. She should have constrained what it could be applied to so she could manage her losses. If I was going to embark on a Groupon campaign, I'd want to look at how much money I would lose per Groupon and then figure out how many Groupons I could afford to sell. If you just open the floodgates without calculating how much you can afford to lose, it's not Groupons fault, it's your own. Even a layman should be able…
Angie's List (my company) has created a similar group coupon system (The Big Deal) as Groupon, but targeted to a more niche market. We actually allow companies to set a hard limit on the number of coupons that can get sold. This allows businesses to offer really great deals that they expect may do negative revenue just to bring in new customers, but control the loss with the limit. I'm surprised Groupon doesn't do th…
"When I talked to Lucinda today, she asked if there was a cap on how many were sold to help protect the business from too much loss, and the simple answer is, no. When you sign up for Groupon, you are agreeing to sell as many as get sold."
Like I keep saying, groupon's longterm value is very, very questionable. The #1 value they are bringing at the moment is convincing shop owners to give a really kickass coupon. That's it! That mailing list of theirs? Sure it's valuable. But send that same mailing list a 15% off coupon typically found in the newspaper and they won't give a crap. And give the same groupon offer in the newspapers and...a lot MORE people…
I wonder why Facebook and Yelp don't just clone Groupon and integrate it with their sites. It would be a money-maker, especially for Yelp, since the demographics are perfect.
Making a poor business decision and then somehow blaming Groupon for it is no better than building a house in a flood plain and not having flood insurance. Groupon works wonderfully for businesses with predictable fixed costs and decreasing marginal costs - bowling alleys, stadiums, art museums etc... It does not work well at all for businesses who need to source product, prepare goods, or provide service - restauran…
> "It’s because we cannot afford to lose any more money on this terrible decision I made" Quote from the end of blog post. Having read through the whole thing I do not believe at any point she blamed Groupon for her predicament - she walked into it eyes wide open and appears to acknowledge this. It does, however, raise interesting questions about Groupon's relevance to the small businesses they purport to help. Group…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Angie's List (my company) has created a similar group coupon system (The Big Deal) as Groupon, but targeted to a more niche market. We actually allow companies to set a hard limit on the number of coupons that can get sold. This allows businesses to offer really great deals that they expect may do negative revenue just to bring in new customers, but control the loss with the limit. I'm surprised Groupon doesn't do th…
Just went there to check out your website. I must say, it is very annoying that after clicking around for a few minutes I couldn't find the cost. That is, without giving you an email address.
We sold 10k jumps for $99. The COGS for this product is about $130. We cannot disclose our cut with GroupOn, but assuming the average 50/50 cut, we're selling these things for less than half of what it costs to produce. Why did we do this?
1.We know that 50% of our gift certificates are never redeemed.
2. We know that 60% of our customers purchase video and/or T-Shirts.
3. We know that about 90% of our customers will jump from 15k or 18k. We just ask that the GroupOns pay the difference in price. $30 to 15k, $90 to 18k.
4. We know that many of our customers bring friends, sign up for our solo training, come back for a second jump, post their video on YouTube, and tell the world how much fun they had.
Our first run sold 800, our second sold 1000. GroupOn customers aren't awful, but they seem to carry a higher percentage of snooty, complainy people. The vast majority of our poor reviews on Yelp come from GroupOn people whose experience really wasn't horrible, they are just particularly nitpicky.
GroupOn is a very dangerous game. I can TOTALLY understand how someone can get their ass handed to them. However, that's part of the numbers game you play. I agree with other comments, if you find a way to get 1000 people to walk in your door and spend money, and you can't figure out how to turn that into a positive for your business, then, well... Maybe you should do something else with your money.
GroupOn is crazy awesome. We love them! We have so far sold 1800 skydives through GroupOn! To put that in perspective, our busiest month this year we put 400 tandems up in the air. In two GroupOn promotions we've sold almost one year's worth of business. Staggering numbers.
I see three immediate problems: 1. The merchant didn't think through the consequences of their promotion. They made a deal that was too appealing to an unnecessarily broad swath of potential customers. A commenter on the blog points out that the better approach is to figure out how to bait the hook for a specific type of desirable customer instead of having a fire sale. 2. Groupon didn't look out for their partner me…
Our company was on Groupon NYC and they took their 50% cut of each Groupon sold (plus the merchant pays the credit card fees - don't forget about that. Your take is actually less than 50%). Luckily we had a bit of a math on our side as our markup on our products is pretty big so even after Groupon's cut, we still made about 15%. As of this writing, only 28% of our Groupons have been redeemed, so we're quite ahead. But I think our case is the exception - I have yet to hear too many stories about businesses thriving because of these social deals.
Who is GlennKelman and why is he/shey only submitting redfin articles and who are redfin and why are the articles deliberately contrarian and who is upvoting them?