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Comment by zmanji | Hacker News Reader

How were their initial steps legal? How can a company file for an IPO with such bullshit metrics?

Counting the amount of money your customers pay you as "revenue" is not a bullshit metric.

Amazon books revenue when someone orders a product, even if that product is "fulfilled by" a different merchant behind the scenes. Some people think they shouldn't be able to count that as revenue. Intelligent accountants disagree with one another.

Accounting is hard. It's rarely black and white. Anyone who was seriously interested in buying Groupon knew what their business model was (collect X from consumer, give X/2 to merchant) and this restatement won't change anyone's informed opinion.

So you are saying that even if no money goes to amazon, they book revenue?

I understood it as, money goes to Amazon but then it immediately moves to the merchant. Showing the money as a revenue then eventually an expense. They probably hold that revenue for a certain financial period and write the expense in another. IANAA.

I looked into their annual report:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol...

In 2010, they say "Generally, we recognize gross revenue from items we sell from our inventory and recognize our net share of revenue of items sold by other sellers."

(Page 19, the second paragraph)

portman's comment could still apply to sales where Amazon acts as the merchant instead of just the storefront.

You can write anythin you want ad long ad there is a * at the end. In this crazy IPO market no one reads the fine print.

It's not that no one knows the fine print, it's that the people who get rich of IPOs (financial people) would typically still make money off an IPO which is based on flawed numbers. So the incentive is not there for the financial people to stop it, the incentive to actually promote it is there.

What makes you say there's a "crazy IPO market?" I can only name four high-profile tech IPOs so far this year (P, LNKD, FIO, Z) - it seems that most high-profile tech companies are content to continue closing massive rounds instead of going public (probably because a lot of them need to generate better figures to avoid pulling a Groupon, but that's speculation on my part).

And it's precisely because the SEC read the fine print that Groupon continues to have issues surrounding its IPO. It's their job to read the fine print.

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