EBay’s PayPal Counts on Its 103 Million Users to Target Groupon. Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- EBay Inc.’s PayPal business, aiming to challenge Groupon Inc. and LivingSocial.com in the market for online daily deals, plans to start offering coupons tailored to users’ buying habits and mobile-phone locations. The company will make its first foray into mobile deals in the first quarter of 2012, partnering with some of the top 200 U.S. merchants, PayPal President Scott Thompson said. PayPal is chasing a daily coupon market that may more than double to $4.17 billion by 2015, according to research firm BIA/Kelsey.
Thompson said PayPal can use its knowledge about customers’ preferences to do coupons better than LivingSocial and Groupon with targeted offers that arrive on users’ smartphones as they’re passing stores. By moving into deals, PayPal can seek to make more money from its 103 million members, helping it close in on a goal of revenue as high as $7 billion by 2013, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010. Market Leaders ‘Counterpunch’ Mobile Wallet Taking on Visa. Groupon starts competing with Amazon in UK e-commerce market. Groupon is extending its group deals service in the UK by offering discounts of more than 80 percent on products sold online, reports Bloomberg. The move puts the Chicago-based startup into closer competition with online retail giant Amazon and online auction service eBay — both of which have communities of online vendors who may now take advantage of Groupon’s services to sell their items.
Groupon’s new service allows UK consumers to purchase product deal codes, which they then enter into an online vendor’s website when making the transaction. It’s a pretty clean way for the startup to remain focused on selling deals instead of technology to push those deals — not unlike its core business of selling daily deals from local restaurants, hotels and other local merchants. Thus far, the company has been extremely successful in its efforts to sell online product deals. GOOGLE OFFERS: Here Are The Secret Details About Google's Groupon-Killer. Groupon hires Google executive for No. 2 job - Chicago Breaking Business. Google will launch its Groupon competitor in Portland. It looks like Google is about to launch the Google Offers deals service that was first revealed in January. The company has put up a page where people can sign up to receive deals that offer 50 percent off or more at local businesses.
The Help page says the program is technically still in beta testing (Google loves to keep products in beta) and will start out in Portland, Ore. before expanding to the New York and San Francisco areas. As for the timing, the Offers help page says: “We’re working hard to get Google Offers up and running in Portland”, that the emails will start arriving “soon”, and that it will add other cities in “the near future.”
When Google started recruiting businesses in January, the Offers program seemed to be pretty closely modeled on Groupon, with deals written up by Googlers and delivered via email — not surprising, since Google previously tried and failed to acquire the group-buying giant for a reported $6 billion.