Today's Deal: $160 gets you a "Brazilian Blowout Treatment" with Giorgio (a $350 value): Get Grouby. Social Buying Site Groupon's Revenues Top $2 Billion a Year | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD. According to sources close to the situation, Groupon’s actual run rate for this year is clocking in at $2 billion in revenue, rather than the widely quoted $500 million. Who knew hawking spas treatments and stripper pole lessons could be so lucrative? About 50 percent ofhat revenue is paid out to the myriad of local merchants–called a pass-through–that the social buying phenom does discount deals with, those kind of numbers give some insight into why Google has been willing to entertain paying up to $6 billion to acquire Groupon. The pair have been in discussions about an acquisition by the search giant, which was first reported here. Over the last several weeks, a much lower $500 million to $600 million annual revenue figure has been used for Groupon–including here.
Apparently, that’s only in one quarter of the year. The Chicago-based start-up is privately held and does not have to release its financial information. Sources said the trio are not at odds over the future of Groupon. Plum District. LocalDealSites.com - Directory of 131 Local Daily Deal Sites, Group Deal Sites, and Group Buying Sites!
Groupon Turns Down Google’s $6 Billion Offer. Groupon has reportedly rejected Google's massive $6 billion acquisition offer and intends to stay independent. The group-buying giant has been the center of the tech world this week after it was reported that Google had offered it $5.3 billion with a $700 million earnout. According to Chicago Breaking Business and Bloomberg, Groupon has decided that it is better off on its own. To say this news comes as a bit of a shock would be an understatement. Many in the technology world believed that Groupon would accept Google's offer, making its three co-founders (CEO Andrew Mason, Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell) billionaires.
Still, there may be a reason why Groupon rejected this offer. If this report is true, then Groupon is eyeing greener pastures and bigger numbers. Groupon Shares Its Expansion Plan: Groupon Stores and the Deal Feed. Amidst the whirlwind of acquisition rumors, Groupon decided to stir the pot some more by announcing the next (possibly the most important yet) step in its long-term strategy: Groupon Stores. Groupon's basic idea - offering one deal per day per city - has done tremendously well in the past, garnering as much as $20 million of monthly revenue for Groupon, but it obviously has to hit a plateau at some point.
Groupon Stores are a solution to that problem. With this new feature, shop owners can set up virtual stores with Groupon and create as many deals as they want. Deal Saturation? Here Comes the Deal Feed This, of course, creates another problem: with so many deals, the one day/one deal/one city model seems to lose value. Groupon also plans to add other features to the Deal Feed, such as connecting your feed to Facebook and see what your friends are doing, which merchants they're following and what deals they're buying. Groupon's Long-Term Strategy. » All Coupons Coupon codes, promo codes and discounts. Groupon Reviews: Worst Marketing For Your Local Business - 99inShareinShare [This is an excerpt from my new book, Groupon: Why Deep Discounts are Bad for Business] Just because millions of merchants have fallen under the spell of Groupon, a PR juggernaut, and their like, it doesn’t mean you should.
It’s a killer alright, a profit-killer. And while I’ll give you my opinions afterwards, here is an actual Groupon merchant story not glowing with anything but red ink. Meet Kim, Owner of a parent teacher store. The Background “First off, let me say that 2009 was a bad year for me. So, in 2010 I was in transition, making changes to cut out all the loss I had in 2009.
Finally I decided to make the call. One thing I didn’t think about was timing- July and August are my busiest times of year. Our Groupon hit on July 21st. I started to panic… Help! Plus all the people I saw first on the list that were buying were current customers! By the time I talked to Groupon almost 400 were sold under the wrong terms and they said I HAD to honor them. In Mr. Related posts: Groupon Reviews Part 2: Horny For The Deal - [This is an excerpt from my new book, Groupon: Why Deep Discounts are Bad for Business] Part 2 of a series of 11 on the perils of discounting for businesses. Today’s post explores more about the financial costs of couponing, discounting and utilizing Groupon and their online clones, coupon blogs and their ilk. Introduction This is not a consumer blog. I’m unabashedly in the business owners’ corner. As a retail expert who speaks and as an information entrepreneur, I speak and write to help businesses be more successful and keep the engine of commerce profitable.
I said it ten years ago with my first book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting, again in my newest book, The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business (Wiley & Sons) and it is a hallmark of my motivational speeches to business owners around the world: Discounting doesn’t build your business. Cherry Picking That means shoppers are able to get the top 20% of your best selling, first run SKUs at a deal.
Price Matching. Groupon Coupons: The Small Biz Challenge. Last October, when Philz Coffee offered users of the coupon website Groupon discounted gift cards for in-store pickup, Jacob Jaber, president of the San Francisco coffee chain, figured on a few hundred takers. He got more than 2,000. "I nowhere near projected the amount of people that showed up," says Jaber. "We just weren't prepared for it. " He ran out of cards, irritating customers, and says he'll probably stick with word-of-mouth marketing from now on. Jaber's mishap spotlights a challenge for Groupon, a Chicago-based startup that has sold nearly 6 million online coupons since its founding in 2008: Sometimes it works too well.
Groupon offers users a daily deal at local establishments ranging from restaurants and shops to skydiving operations and spas. It works with businesses in more than 140 cities in 18 countries. Privately held Groupon, which declined to comment on its financials, says it aims to double its U.S. coverage to 100 cities this year. GetGrouby.com Introduces Next Generation of Social Commerce Solutions. Houston, TX (PRWEB) July 20, 2010 Move over, Groupon! One deal a day isn’t enough anymore. A new start-up website, GetGrouby.com, based in Texas aims to take the group-buying to the next level. GetGrouby.com, launched in June 2010, appears at first glance to be a simple Groupon clone, offering daily deals on spa treatments, food, fitness classes, and other local goods and services. Upon closer inspection, however, GetGrouby.com reveals a set of tools designed to revolutionize group buying on the Web.
“Groupon is an amazing site, but it has limitations,” remarks James Pruett, founder and CEO of GetGrouby.com. At the heart of GetGrouby.com’s innovative methodology and technology is the company’s rejection of Groupon’s tried-and-true model of discounting a single offer from a single business each day. “Groupon offers a one-size-fits-all solution to social commerce,” Pruett said. GetGrouby.com’s fresh approach can also make group buying a more personal experience. Today, Mr. Recently, Mr. Free Coupons, coupon codes, online coupons and promotional codes - CouponCabin. Fetchapon. Deals Galore, Competitors Abound: A Primer On Groupon-Like Startups. Lately, group-buying sites and other companies that use discount-deals as the core of their business have become a red-hot trend, with Groupon spreading through cities around the world at a frantic pace and countless competitors and clones trying to catch some of the spotlight.
Perhaps the reason for the sites’ traction is that the group-buying model is easy to understand. For those that haven’t tried them, companies like Groupon find local restaurants, spas, or other businesses that are willing to provide large discounts, provided that their name is spread to a number of new customers. Groupon advertises the business by offering the coupons online, and takes a cut of the money spent on them. Groupon Groupon is the market leader in the online “group buying” industry, and according to Crunchbase Groupon has raised a whopping $172.8M in funding to date. LivingSocial Additionally, LivingSocial uses a different incentive to encourage more people to sign up for their deals. Gilt City BuyWithMe. Coming Soon: Groupon Stores and the Deal Feed « Groublogpon – The Serious Blog of Groupon. This summer, [we launched personalization]( to bring you deals that better suit your interests. We weren’t about to stop there – today, we’re giving you a sneak peak of some new stuff that will bring you even more deals you love: Groupon Stores and the Deal Feed. ### Groupon Stores With [Groupon Stores]( businesses can now create and launch their own deals whenever they want.
Think of it as the online equivalent of a merchant’s physical storefront. Merchants can now: * Setup a permanent (and free!) Each day we’ll select the best deals from Groupon Stores and match them to customers using our personalization technology. ### The Deal Feed To keep track of these extra deals, we created the Deal Feed. ### Why we built it We originally designed Groupon to account for the constraints of being a small company.
Personalization, Stores, and the Deal Feed are our attempt to re-imagine things. Group Buying, Big Discounts from Local Businesses.