what i meant was maybe 5-10 came in a second time, but close to none returned after. She definitely would not do it again.

I don't see how GOOG didn't know they could crush them before they had the $6B rejected.

That's one of the major differences between an owner, and a marketing company. For the former its not just a % of net sales in a ledger, its actual cash money that must be spent. While the latter see an instant profit for very little capital expended.

An old buddy of mine never advertised his auto repair shop, even in things like school event programs or other niche products. His opinion was he was working for free for a few hrs just to get his cash back.

imo, these types of mass marketing efforts can work if the intent is to raise the profile and gross receipts in a business prior to selling it. That's a common trend in restaurants, the seller has deals with many locals, institutions, special interest groups; then after the sale, all those patrons suddenly stop showing up.

It's easier to acquire someone else who has grown a company in just 2 years to $1B in annual revenue then to try to duplicate their success. I'm sure they were more than willing to start it themselves but if they could just acquire the #1 player and their team it saves a lot of trouble.

Also, my wife got a 50% off lasik deal from LivingSocial last week (bought in december, surgery last week). I talked to the person at the clinic who arranged the deal with LivingSocial and she had similar comments about groupon.

They wanted standard 50% of rev and wouldn't budge at all. After trying to haggle with them she went with livingsocial instead who took ~25% of rev IIRC. Groupon rep called her up immediately when the deal went out and said "I thought we were working together!?" and she told him the rake was a deal killer for them. They sold ~100+ of the coupons @ $2100 each. gg Groupon

Later they did a similar deal in a different market with Groupon who agreed to take just 20%. They featured it as a side deal instead of the main deal (rock climbing lol) and only sold like 75 of them after extending the deal to 5 days. Groupons main sales pitch is their massive subscriber base which dwarfs the competition.

I kind of get the impression that Groupon thinks they have something unique and can push people around. I don't think they're going to wise up any time soon.

My wife's salon did a sale of an expensive hair procedure with groupon. (Keratin Complex) In our small market, they sold ~50 of the $200 gift cards. (Valued at $400)

A week later a different salon did the same exact deal except it was $175. That salon did it with livingsocial. They sold 3 gift cards.

Probably most of the women interested in this jumped on the $200 gift card and didn't need the same treatment a week later? It would be more interesting to see something like that offered on the different sites at the same time from the same salon. I bet a huge percentage of Groupons active subscriber base has also signed up for the sites that are gaining market share.

TBH I don't ever remember signing up for livingsocial at all but somehow I'm on their list

Google's coming out with a competitor. Not announced yet, but this logo is pretty telling...
https://www.google.com/images/logos/offers_logo.gif

Leaked Fact Sheet:
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/47286019

IMHO that really doesn't say anything, both of those "documents" could have been made up in about 3 minutes.

Search Engine Land got a statement from Google

SOURCE

Having the deals so close together would definitely take some of the sales but I'm not sure how much.

Also, using big round numbers (such as $200 for $400 value) sounds a lot better/more exciting to most people than $175 for $400, even though that is obviously $25 better.

Poor Groupon.

This week in Phoenix they had a 50% off $60 for a fancy restaurant. They sold 2500 coupons. I bought three.

2500 is a ton of coupons, and most of these buyers are probably like me who will spend $30 to take their gf to dinner but rarely $60. There's no way this coupon is profitable for them after Groupon's cut right? I don't know what the capacity of the place is, but it seems like this one deal will put the restaurant in the red for a couple months and very few of these customers will regularly return short of another huge discount.

I think getting repeat traffic is one problem restaurants will face as these coupons get more and more popular. Between Groupon, Living Social and Scoutmob I have very little reason to ever go to a restaurant that isn't offering 50% off. When my girl friend and I want to go out to eat now we just pull out our phones and see where we can go for half price.

I have enjoyed a lot of the places we've gone but as a relatively thrifty minded grad student couple I'm not sure that we'd really consider going back to most of them without another discount. Maybe its a little different for people with more money, but I bet a lot of restaurants aren't going to get nearly as much increased traffic after the deal is over as they expected.