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I think it is weird that Forbes calls Groupon a "social buying site", even though that just sell coupons online.

• pimlottc 12y ago
  It's always instructive to look at something from a different context, but the value provided by Groupon is not so much in selling coupons but in creating a system to capture and direct a userbase in order to create new coupons that didn't existing already.
• wnissen 12y ago
  That's what it was originally. The idea was that the coupon would only be sold if you got a certain number of people together. So it's sort of like these buying clubs that group a bunch of individuals together and buy from the low bidder. Once Groupon got big there were so many takers for each deal that the buying club aspect fell by the wayside.
  • tehabe 12y ago
    I remember a Dutch company which tried that, if a certain number of people would buy the would be slightly cheaper. But they couldn't really attract a lot of customers despite a huge budget across Europe. So it failed.
    • chkuendig 12y ago
      That was LetsBuyIt.com, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1122354.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1122354.stm
  • alasdair_ 12y ago
    Remarkably, Massdrop is managing to continue to do exactly this. I wonder if they can scale past their techie/nerd niche.