The shape of Groupon things to come? Over the Black Friday weekend retail sale fest in the US, the leading group-buy coupon platform for local deals focused not on local deals, but Woot/Gilt style online deals. Online deals for Barclays Wine, Simon & Schuster Books and confectionary from Chocolate.com (screenshots below) were offered, further blurring and distinction between flash sale sites, group-buy and daily deal sites.
A response to Facebook Deals, or a seduction dance for more wooing of Google?
Whatever the reason, Groupon is looking ever-more like a universal deals platform – with the Group-Buy mechanism now little more than a marketing hook. Opportunity for a new real tuangou-style group buy platform to emerge?
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Paul Marsden, Yuji Kaneko. Yuji Kaneko said: 記事まだ読んでないけど、それってクーポンなんだろうか。 RT marsattacks: Groupon Focuses on Online, Not Local Deals [Screenshots] http://goo.gl/fb/GCU4d SocComToday […]
+1 for the blurring of boundaries between “flash sales/physical products” and “group buying/services or digital goods”.
However, it will be hard to offer the same kind of discounts on expensive/non-recurrent products (TV sets, fridges) than on cheap/recurrent/High cost of acquisition products like wine or books.
[…] online flash sales (Woot, Gilt et al.) and group-buy local deals (Groupon, LivingSocial). Just as Groupon is running online deals with e-tailers, and Gilt is running deals with local retailers, LivingSocial is now offering realtime deals for […]
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