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They did, years ago. No one used it. I think there's a few reasons: 1. Groupons have to be sold over the phone to merchants in order for Groupon to get the m
by brandnewlow 14y ago
They did, years ago. No one used it.
I think there's a few reasons:
1. Groupons have to be sold over the phone to merchants in order for Groupon to get the margins and volume it wants.
2. Local merchants just don't have a lot of time to spend learning software and monitoring stats. They can talk to a sales rep over the phone more easily than set up a deal themselves.
- suresk 14y agoAnother problem is controlling the quality of deals that merchants add. The whole selling point of Groupon (and similar "deal" services that have sprung up) is that they aren't just the run of the mill coupons you get in the mail every week - they are generally big, interesting deals. If Groupon sent you 100 deals every day that were "buy one get one free" or "$1.00 off" or whatever, it wouldn't be very interesting and they'd likely lose a lot of subscribers. So, policing the quality of deals and working with merchants to make sure they are offering a deal that fits with what you are doing is going to be a significant source of overhead no matter what.
- taf2 14y agosounds like they could use or try similar logic to HN karma, voting etc... to automate some of this... imagine if each purchase of a coupon was a vote and the karma collected by a vendor gave them more freedom in posting new deals...
- arbuge 14y agonot bad... ...the self-serving issue is the big issue though. Local merchants at this point in time still don't do web-based self-serve solutions much or at all. Maybe that will change as the world becomes internet-savvier in general, but it's where we are right now.
- antidoh 14y agoRequiring a human employee for individual sales works for Best Buy and McDonalds, where labor is cheap. I wouldn't think that scales to higher cost sales professionals.