Eh. How much Groupon disappointment do you think comes instead from brick & mortar small businesses being utterly unacquainted with the high-volume low-conversion sales model of the web? Because that seems like the thesis behind Groupon: give local biz a taste of how customer acquisition is tuned and scaled on the web.
I'm a loyal customer of several well-known, well-regarded small businesses in Chicago, and none of them have the marketing savvy of the least-successful successful web startup we can think of.
So in that regard, I think the people who worry about the disloyal deal hunters miss the point a bit. That's the flip side of the 5-10% conversion rate: the 90% who bounce. Web people don't flip out about this. Local biz does.
Remember, the most popular current alternative to Groupon is advertising. The only reason local biz people don't flip out over advertising effectiveness is that nobody knows how to figure it out.
I'm a loyal customer of several well-known, well-regarded small businesses in Chicago, and none of them have the marketing savvy of the least-successful successful web startup we can think of.
So in that regard, I think the people who worry about the disloyal deal hunters miss the point a bit. That's the flip side of the 5-10% conversion rate: the 90% who bounce. Web people don't flip out about this. Local biz does.
Remember, the most popular current alternative to Groupon is advertising. The only reason local biz people don't flip out over advertising effectiveness is that nobody knows how to figure it out.