What is Groupon? Groupon Review

Website Introduction

Groupon is a compound word of "group" and "coupon", calling on online audiences to "act immediately" and merchants will get exclusive "exposure rate". Groupon is the homonym of "coupon", which means coupon.

Groupon is not a pure e-commerce website, but a combination of e-commerce, web2.0, Internet advertising and offline models. Although its form is group buying and its revenue model is based on commissions, the future of Groupon is very uncertain.

Features of Groupon Website

1. Purchase in group purchases, that is, if the purchase volume does not meet a certain standard, the transaction cannot be successfully carried out;

2. The main products sold by Groupon are coupons for various service industries such as catering, entertainment and fitness venues. The discounts on these coupons are relatively large, generally more than 50% off the original price.

Groupon Business Model

1. Fund management

Groupon's fund management is mainly divided into three parts: resource allocation, core competitiveness, and partner network

Core Competitiveness: How to expand and utilize offline merchants at the lowest cost

Partner network includes merchants, payment tools (such as Alipay, banks, etc.)

Resource allocation: website, operation team

2. Product Services

Groupon's focus on product and service is on value proposition: cost-effective products and services.

The products provided by Groupon are mainly for serving merchants and users, and the merchants play the role of channel sellers. Groupon's users are all 29-33 years old with high spending power. Therefore, for merchants, the Groupon platform has accurate positioning, clear goals, and low costs, making it the best platform for advertising.

Merchants can gain full exposure and enhance their influence through Groupon; and through the super large number of users brought by the platform, they can sell high-quality goods or services, and then spread the word by word of mouth, attracting more users to consume again.

3. Customers

Groupon's customer aspects mainly include: customer relationships, distribution channels, target customers

Customer relationships can be obtained through EDM, SNS, websites, Weibo, etc.

Distribution channels: Groupon mostly uses direct sales, but some websites also outsource offline merchant development to teams with local resources.

Target customers: Groupon's target customers are mainly young people who have the habit of online shopping, have a curiosity mentality, and are easily attracted by discounts.

4. Finance

Groupon's financial aspects are mainly based on two aspects: cost structure and profit model

The cost structure includes human resource costs and marketing costs, such as SEM, inviting people to write soft articles, topic hype, etc.

Note: Offline team costs are much higher than online team costs

Profit Model

Groupon's profit model is mainly that it has a transaction commission of 30%-50%, and a collection period of two months, that is, 1/3 is settled on the day the online group buying activity ends, 1/3 is settled after 1 month, and the remaining 1/3 is settled in 2 months. In this way, it can quickly recover funds, realize profits, and expand wildly while making profits.

Settled in China

In February 2011, Groupon and Tencent finalized a joint venture to establish a group buying website in China, Gaopeng.com, to leverage Tencent's traffic and user advantages to develop group buying business. However, Gaopeng was declared a failure in April, and its business and team were merged into Ftuan.

On August 1, 2012, Gaopeng.com announced its merger with Ftuan to form the "Wangluotianxia" company.

scale

Groupon has partnered with more than 1 million merchants.

With 48.3 million active customers worldwide, the company ranks among the top 5 e-commerce brands in the United States in terms of monthly independent users.

Groupon has the #1 retail app on iOS and Android with over 150 million downloads and was recognized as one of the top 25 most popular apps of 2016.

Financing

On August 20, 2014, OrderUp announced the completion of a $7 million Series A financing round led by Revolution and followed by Tim O'Shaughnessy, co-founder of LivingSocial.

In January 2015, Groupon raised $950 million in funding.

In February 2015, it raised another $16.2 million

Acquisition

Groupon acquired CityDeal in May 2010.

In May 2010, Groupon announced the acquisition of German group buying website Citydeal.

In August 2010, the US group buying website Groupon announced on Tuesday that it had acquired the majority stakes of the Japanese group buying website Qpod and the Russian group buying website Darberry. Groupon will change the names of the above two companies to Groupon.

In April 2011, Groupon acquired Pelago, the developer of the location-based service Whrrl.

In October 2016, the American group buying website Groupon announced that it would acquire LivingSocial.

In July 2017, Groupon announced the acquisition of the food delivery O2O company OrderUp, which means that the company is ready to expand into the food delivery field and provide services similar to GrubHub.

Groupon Development History

Groupon was founded on November 11, 2008 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

In 2010, Groupon expanded its business from the United States to 35 countries.

On December 1, 2010, Google's acquisition of the American group buying website Groupon had not yet been completed.

In the early morning of February 16, 2011, the homepage of "Gaopeng", the group buying website jointly developed by Groupon and Tencent, was taken offline.

In July 2011, Groupon quietly registered several related domain names, such as crazeal.com/.net and crazeals.com/.net.

In October 2011, Groupon acquired the domain name grouponreserve.com. Now, visiting this domain name will jump to groupon.com.

On October 18, 2011, Groupon applied for the trademark "Groupon Reserve" to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

On November 4, 2011, Groupon was listed on the NASDAQ.

On December 1, 2011, Groupon launched two features: Deal Feed and Groupon Stores.

On January 21, 2012, Groupon acquired Mertado, a social shopping startup incubated by Y Combinator.

On November 15, 2012, Groupon announced the promotion of Kal Raman to Chief Operating Officer (COO).

In December 2012, Groupon rejected an acquisition offer from Google.

On April 3, 2013, the number of Groupon mobile users increased significantly by 223%.

On October 2, 2018, IBM and Groupon reached a long-term patent cross-licensing agreement.

References

• 1. Groupon website introduction: Hudong Encyclopedia [reference date 2018-03-17T16:00:00.000Z]
• 3. Groupon acquires LivingSocial, which was once valued at $6 billion: NetEase website [cited on 2016-10-23T16:00:00.000Z]
• 4. Groupon acquires German group buying website Citydeal: Sohu.com [cited on 2010-05-13T16:00:00.000Z]
• 5. Groupon, the originator of group buying, acquires food delivery O2O company OrderUp: Yiou website [cited on 2015-07-13T16:00:00.000Z]
• 6. Groupon acquires majority stake in Japanese and Russian group buying websites: Tencent News [cited on 2010-08-14T16:00:00.000Z]