Groupon

We tried livingsocial.com about 8 months ago had a great response, sold thirtey deals we offered upto 300 sq. ft fabric protector included for 67.50, normally 168.00. We up sold 25 deals to an average ticket of between 250.00 to 400.00 not including the 67.50 deal we sold thru living social. The way they work it is 70/30 with you getting the 70% & they pay all credit card trasaction fees. Groupon is 50/50 and you pay all transaction fees, groupon will wiggle a little but not much, they won’t budge on the 50/50 but will assume some of the transaction fees but not much,another thing is the length of the coupon, we offered for 4 months, you probably don’t want to go any longer then that. groupon wanted us to offer a 6 month coupon.

Overall it was awesome, we are planning to do it again the beginning of next year,the quality of the customers are middle to highend,most of living social & groupon buyers are collage grads & their median income is 75,000 per year or higher, this information was provided to me by there sales staff, when you speak to the sales person they guide you as to what has worked in the past in a market similar to yours. There were 5 people that is all they wanted was the basic deal but we were able to leave them an info packet with the other services we offer, based on the results from the cleaning of their carpet we should hear from them for our other services,we did get call backs from some of the other people we up sold. I tile & grout job about 600 sq. ft. another one was 2 bathrooms of tile thats all so far, i always asked when they called us are you interested in having additional areas cleaned some said yes, some said maybe, some said no. In my market going low on the deal was the key for me to being able to upsell like i did.if I ever did meet an eskimo in florida it probably would not be hard to sell them ice here…hahaha. On some of these people even after they said no I left them the multi service sheet with the info packet & while we were doing our thing we were able to upsell them. The deal lasts on the living social web-site for 24 hours, 10 buisness days after the deal closes you get a check directly from living social. They do not get a dime from your upsells.
Nobody was more suprised then me with the amount of the upsells we were able to get, it just clicked for us. They had one other carpet cleaner since our deal with living social & he did not sell half as many deals as us. 2/3rds of the people that bought our deal mentioned the quick dry time. After living social gives you there input you have the final say, there are some things they try to grt you to do like a 6 month coupon i told them no. Groupon is harder to work with they will not be as flexible as living social, groupon will say their bigger then living social they are, but not by much, thats their comment when you ask them to match the deal you have with living social. I hope i answered all your questions Dave Devlin if not call me my number is 904.786.1954

We did a “Seize The Deal” promotion about three weeks ago and it is similar to the Groupon offering. I keep hearing of other deals too, and they all seem roughly the same. Ours offered $80 worth of cleaning for $40. Due to some kind of schedualing mixup, we got three days of advertising instead of one, and were able to sell 89 coupons. Atleast 75% of them would be new customers, and a couple of them bought as many as three coupons. We stipulated one coupon per visit but we’ll see how that works out.
We’ve done about ten of those sales so far, so it’s a little early to determine how it’s all going to work out. Half of those have been just the deal while the rest did have some add ons.
Seize The Deal splits the payment 50/50, so some of these jobs we are doing for $20, but we already knew we would have to approach those types of jobs as being a way of introducing ourselves to new customers. So far, most have said they would definetly have us back again, but then, only time will tell.
Speaking of time, in Montana, buying a coupon online is the same as buying a giftcard, and giftcards do not have an expiration date here. We will be required to honor these indefinetly.
We also had several people call us and ask if we would be willing to give them the same deal even though they had not bought the coupon online. We did agree to take those jobs as well, since we would keep the entire $40.
This system has the added benefit of no up front advertising expenses. Sieze The Deal only makes money if their promotions are effective, so there is an incentive on their part to do a good job for you. It’s up to us to make the most of it once we honor a coupon.
If we decide to do this again, we will probable do it in early December, hoping to improve our bottom line in Jan and Feb, our slow months.

There is an excellent article on Group On in this months edition of ICS, page 50 and 51

Just spoke with a Living Social rep today and told me the split was 60/40 (60 me/40 them). Sounds to me like something fishy goin on here.

Never again? So I’m guessing you wouldn’t recommend doing it?