[Groupon employee speaking] Group buying is still relevant in new markets. In established markets almost every deal tips. many merchants are not sophisticate

[Groupon employee speaking] Group buying is still relevant in new markets. In established markets almost every deal tips. many merchants are not sophisticated enough to structure their deals properly such that it is economically beneficial to them One of the services that the margin on the deal pays for. G wants the merchants to have a good experience (95%+ report that they do) and continue to use G as opposed to other deal sites. Deal makers here structure the deal to maximize benefit to the business. That's why you'll get $20 for $10 to a sandwich place, $10 for $4 at an ice cream shop, and $50 for $25 at a steak house. This is with the insight of all the other deals made in your city. Merchants must give blanket discounts, and have no ability to segment or run comprehensive campaigns. In particular, merchants can not do things like target existing customers with reward programs, and new customers with enticement programs This is true for the "Daily Deal" which gets the most exposure and are outsized deals. These are basically a marketing budget spend, but the money goes to G and the customers instead of advertising media. New personalization and deal feed features (currently out in limited markets) let merchants put deals at will to previous and interested customers completely outside of the daily email. Also, G's intention is to get customers to the business, not to take over the business relationship. Businesses should have their own rewards programs, etc. We have three problems to solve; 1) long term economic viability for merchants through assisted program creation, 2) segmentation and campaigning for merchants, 3) relevance for customers. #1 is already something we do. #2,3 exist to a limited extent but we're working (a lot) on improving them) What if we had a "personal fingerprint" for each consumer that is subscribing or consuming from a stream, as well as the attributes of merchants and their individual campaigns? If that fingerprint contained rich information about their interests, demographic information, and so on, then we could both assist the user in subscribing to only those promotions that meet their interests, and assist the merchant in very fine grained segmenting and targeting. It's like you read our mind. But just as most small businesses aren't good at or interested in marketing, it's the same for segmenting and targeting. I think as a data-head, Bradford is overestimating how much merchants want to do that. They just want a stream of customers coming through the door and Groupon does that in a very hassle-free way.