Comment by zoomzoom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zoomzoom | Hacker News Reader

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Google has enough publicity power and local business relationships (AdWords, Places) that they will have less trouble than anyone else signing up businesses to be part of the deals. Probably even FB. Then, they also have their ad network and services (gmail, search, maps, etc) to sign up users and promote offers. This is 2 good solutions for problem #1 for a local business deals network.

Google is making a smart move. Most of the bigger deal sites share an uncanny similarity - they are called "clones" for a reason. And the way to stand out is to offer better deals. I have gotten the Groupon newsletter since they came to NYC, and I have never bought a deal. And I am usually a very compulsive shopper. There is not enough variety and nothing is that compelling. The way to stand out is to target deals better so you can make money on margins instead of volume and offer more lucrative deals for businesses. FB may have as much data, but Google has shipped better big-data targeting than anybody else. You need to acquire, sort, and analyze the data, and then have the relationships to exploit your insights. And as location, purchase history, and timing come into play, the data is going to get big if you want to target deals well.

This. The notion that Google would even need to resort to low brow tactics other people are mentioning (like snooping on Groupon advertising data or banning them outright) are pretty absurd, obviously immoral and completely unnecessary for this to work. I've also been a Groupon member and after not seeing anything compelling for awhile I'm starting to dismiss it as spam.

Google has a ton of users on the business and consumer end, and a ton of public trust despite all this recent rambling. For the price they were going to pay for Groupon they can make this work. They will be able to attract offers that can appeal to a wider audience do to their sheer volume of their current business clients who are already earning solid ROIs advertising from Google and could easily be enticed to give this new Offers thing a try.

"And as location, purchase history, and timing come into play, the data is going to get big if you want to target deals well."

Data, especially at scale, is extremely powerful in this business: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/11/why-we-invested-in-groupon-...

The one question I continue to have in a situation like this is the "bytes v. beings" approach. Self-service is very compelling and certainly the "holy grail" of local advertising, but more often than not, the onramp to Google for small business is AdWords and that's hard, really hard to understand for a small business owner. I'm not sure if the small business owner is really reading through Google's AdWords University documents and watching the YouTube videos. You're going to need people to sell to people and not just bytes on a screen.

The salesforce, in the immediate term, I feel is the largest initiative Google needs to take on. Demand will always be there, especially across their widespread network. Just get the best merchants (note: quality of the deal is still important in large markets like NYC) and perfect the sales process.

> I'm not sure if the small business owner is really reading through Google's AdWords University documents and watching the YouTube videos. You're going to need people to sell to people and not just bytes on a screen.

This is so true. We've just launched a Groupon-clone a couple a months ago in an European country which has a high percentage of Internet penetration, but even though we've built a very simple online system for the business owners to be able to check the redeem-status of the coupons (once the deal is over), there's the problem that more than half of them don't have a computer or Internet connection at the POS. So right now we email them an Excel file with all the coupon codes which they can print at home. Now, asking these people to know about AdWords and such... I don't see how the situation in the States would be so much different.

I'm not subscribed to the newsletter (use fake emails to get in), but every time I've checked Groupon it's been something that is really not applicable to me. One day it was carpet cleaning, another day junk removal, and today laser hair removal. I'd think that Groupon would go for things that have a wider appeal, like food or entertainment. Oh well.

If only we could short Groupon and LivingSocial. I would prefer Google Offers to Groupon any day and I can see stores in less tech savvy areas preferring to offer deals with Google Offers versus Groupon (which they've probably never heard of) just because of the brand name.

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