The Groupon dirty secret • Hacker News Board

Re: The Groupon dirty secret

#21

Post by nhangen » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 2:36 AM UTC

pchristensen wrote: post #17

[Groupon Employee Speaking] Keep in mind that when that study was done (June 2009), Groupon was 9 months old . Since then, Groupon has expanded to dozens of countries and hundreds of cities, raised over $1B, hired thousands of employees, and refined its processes a zillion-fold. It's no secret in the company that our long term success is based on a) customers having great experiences, and b) merchants getting a retur…

I have a friend in SF that loves your service. The only problem is that every time she goes to redeem a groupon, she gets berated by the staff and feels like she's a different class of customer.

This rainbows and unicorns thing isn't the reality from what I'm getting.

Re: The Groupon dirty secret

#22

Post by jarek » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 2:50 AM UTC

oiuhjyftgrdgh wrote: post #6

angelbob wrote: post #5

Sounds like he's pretty much saying "Groupon is a great tool for a specific purpose, but don't use it without thinking about it." Which is good advice. Specifically, it will attract a lot of customers, but runs the risk of reducing customer perception of the value of your product. Sounds like a good match if bargain-seekers are your target market -- your promotion ends, and you're still among the best deals. But it s…

Not necessarily - groupon being on the internet and relatively 'cool' still doesn't have the public perception of a newspaper coupon. I have used it to buy stuff at high end clothes stores (well Gap - but anything other than $3 black T shirts is high end for me!). If I ever needed more clothes I might go back to Gap, it did get me to go into a store I wouldn't have entered and was probably cheaper and more effective…

Gap is hardly the issue here. Most people who shop at the Gap won't really care if people wearing $3 black tshirts descend on the store every now and then and start wearing the clothes. For actually high-end products, making it more popular with the hoi polloi can mean the end of popularity with the original target audience, and the new market can often be more difficult to make decent profit in.

If everyone who heard about it on the internet could afford a Lamborghini, no movie star would own one, no matter how fast it went.

Re: The Groupon dirty secret

#23

Post by araneae » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 2:57 AM UTC

nhangen wrote: post #21

pchristensen wrote: post #17

[Groupon Employee Speaking] Keep in mind that when that study was done (June 2009), Groupon was 9 months old . Since then, Groupon has expanded to dozens of countries and hundreds of cities, raised over $1B, hired thousands of employees, and refined its processes a zillion-fold. It's no secret in the company that our long term success is based on a) customers having great experiences, and b) merchants getting a retur…

I have a friend in SF that loves your service. The only problem is that every time she goes to redeem a groupon, she gets berated by the staff and feels like she's a different class of customer. This rainbows and unicorns thing isn't the reality from what I'm getting.

I've bought probably 5 or so groupons, and I've been happy with them. I do feel a little sheepish using them, but the staff have seemed fine with it so far.