Comment by crunchykeith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crunchykeith | Hacker News Reader

This could not be more true. I have ran three groupon in 3 different markets and although they were successful I felt the Groupon representative I worked with in each case had no idea what was going on. The first time around they sent the wrong coupon codes to everyone and had to resend them. The second time they promised us that we would be the primary deal in our entire region of 250,000 people. We ended up getting sent out to subset of 50,000 people most of whom were not in our coverage area. A similar thing happened with the third Groupon.

The problem in my case seems to be that the Groupon representative is just trying to make the sale and is lacking a lot of operational knowledge.

Out of curiosity, why did you go with them three times? There must have been some benefits; how did you make out all told?

EDIT: Would you go with them again?

crunchykeith said they were successful.

They were all successful and Groupon is the leader in the space so we figured we would get the most exposure by using them. Despite them being successful there always seemed to be something that went wrong. Groupon tries to sell these things as miscommunications which I don't buy. We have also run deals with living social and twongo. Both of these we not nearly as successful as the Groupon deals we have run.

The problem is that I can't help but get the feeling that Groupon doesn't really care about the success of the merchants business. All they care about is how many Coupons they are going to sell and how much money they are going to make off it.

Another incentive to stay with Groupon is that they have made us a preferred merchant which gives us a couple of advantages i.e. receiving our money from the deal much sooner than the average Groupon merchant.

Yes we are going to use Groupon again and again and again because for our business it has been a major customer acquisition strategy that we have solid numbers to prove is definitely working.

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