Items tagged with Groupon
Mobile payments are exploding, and Groupon is getting in on the game. The daily deal company just announced GrouponPayments, which lets customers accept credit cards at low transaction costs. The service is built into the company’s smartphone app and can be combined with hardware that turns your smartphone into a card reader. Rather than make serious money from GrouponPayments, Groupon sees the new service as a convenience for its customers and a way to strengthen the position it’s trying to build as the go-to platform for service and retail businesses. Groupon is touting a lack of monthly fees and low transaction rates of 1.8% plus $0.15 per transaction for Discover, MasterCard,...
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No one will deny that Groupon struck gold by bringing daily deals to locals all around the country. But like the original gold rush, not everyone who goes in search of riches ends up finding it. Groupon knockoffs are having a tough go on the Web, and so are deal sites in general. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, roughly a third of all daily deal sites in the nation have called it quits so far in 2011. To attach some hard numbers to that claim, WSJ says exactly 170 out of 530 daily deal sites have fizzled out so far, and there are still more than three months left in the year. Part of the problem is it's simply too expensive to run a daily deal site. It takes a great deal of marketing...
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You can thank Groupon (and all of those Groupon clones) for this one. T-Mobile USA has just pulled a fast one by entering into the deals space. Yes, deals. The company has just launched More for Me, which is listed as a nationwide aggregation service that offers consumers various deals each day. As you may expect, the service is totally free, and starting this week, Android users on the network can download the beta version of the T-Mobile More for Me application from Android Market. More for Me is the first nationwide daily deal aggregation service of its kind from a national wireless carrier. Discounts and deals are generated from popular social buying sites, such as LivingSocial – the...
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Love travel? Love deals. You're in luck. Groupon, the shared coupon site that started it all, has just cranked up another partnership, and this time it's not with just another city. It's with a company, and it's poised to change the way you think about spontaneous vacations. Groupon has teamed with Expedia, a huge name in the travel booking industry, to create Groupon Getaways. The world's largest online travel company teaming up with the world's most well-known couponing site, and the result is an "unprecedented offering that will connect consumers with high quality travel offers and give travel suppliers brand exposure among millions of shoppers." Groupon Getaways with Expedia will offer consumers...
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It was probably a great campaign if you understood it, but even then, Groupon's Super Bowl ad campaign was in pretty poor taste. On Thursday, the company announced it was pulling all of the ads, not just the particularly contentious "Tibet" ad starring Timothy Hutton. In fact, the campaign was not just supposed to advertise Groupon, it as also to gather donations for a number of different causes (which indeed, were given a jab during the ads) on Groupon's SaveTheMoney site (now gone). According to Groupon, that campaign will net about $500,000 for various charities, a good thing. Here's what Groupon CEO Andrew Mason said, in his last post on the spots. Five days have passed since the Super Bowl,...
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If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. And if you can't buy 'em, create some competition! That's the route that Google is taking these days, with reports coming out this week that Google is planning to launch a new Groupon rival called 'Google Offers." The search giant has yet to confirm or deny the news, but being that it was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal and Mashable, we doubt it's fabricated. And it makes sense. Groupon has seen huge success, and Google would obviously love to play a role in taking some of that pie. By launching a daily deals website, Google could capture huge amounts of consumer interest, and being that it has Google.com to market the new site, we suspect that many...
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If you owned a deal-of-the-day website, how hard would it be to turn down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google? Probably really difficult, but Groupon didn't bat an eye when it told Google to take a hike. That's hard to fathom. According to reports, each board member would have received millions, if not hundreds of millions by signing on the dotted line. And what about Groupon co-founders Brady Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky? They would have cashed out with $600 million (Keywell) and $1.8 billion (Lefkosfky). So how on earth did they manage to turn down the offer? Maybe they didn't. According to a report in Business Insider, Google's Marissa Mayer hinted that the deal may not have been nixed, but...
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Some of the Internet's biggest retail players are setting their sights on the flourishing business of local services. Google is reportedly interested in buying local coupon site Groupon for as much as $6 billion and Amazon.com is planning to invest $175 million in online coupon company LivingSocial, a Groupon competitor. eBay is buying Milo.com, which lets users see if items they seek are available on local store shelves. Needless to say, local-services sites and offerings are HOT. Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners said, "It's local mania." As Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed, a company that recently invested $8 million in LivingSocial put it, local deals are "the most exciting,...
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