This is a pretty significant piece of the news. With groupon famous for its slow payment terms, 3 day terms may look very attractive. Cash flow management is a big portion of running many small/local businesses and with most of their vendor terms from 7-30 days the 30+ day delivery from groupon can turn a big success into a big problem. This sounds like a great sales differentiator for them.

Even if google doesn't get significant traction out of the gate, if this forces groupon to abandon their aggressive floats it could have a real effect on how good their financials look leading up to an IPO.

Imagine if Google was willing to take a significantly lower revenue share on the deals to gain market share. A big reason everyone is so breathless about the business model is how crazy the margins are. If google was willing to throw a significant amount of the $6B offer price at a promotional pricing structure they could seriously slow down the rate that the competition expanded markets.