Okies, but small business shouldn't IMO be suckered into something like Groupon without having numbers checked first. It's their fault they use service that can destroy their value.
I don't see what is the difference between being sucker punched by Groupon or by paying marketing agency for over-priced billboard posters placed on road to nowhere.
Agreed. But at least in advertising, there is an established price for the service a business would receive, and the transaction would center on the value of that service. When crawling into bed with the snakes at Groupon, they spin the perception of the transaction so that the focus is not on Groupon's "service", instead the transaction appears to be between the business and the hoards of locust Groupon sends out. And Groupon will look you straight in the face and tell you that's a good thing. One key realization that provoked me into this anti-Groupon rant was when I discovered that the purpostedly open-ended nature of the "conversation" regarding the terms of the deal was really NOT open-ended. Groupon had an exorbitant demand on how much of the revenue that they would receive, but they lied and described this as "negotiable". It took hours of "conversation" and fucking around with superfluous details and sorting through all of the lies and distortions that Groupon threw out there before I discovered that they have a very set formula for how much revenue they intend to get from any deal with any particular service and/or product provider.
Meaning, in "X" niche, selling "Y" product, Groupon demands a maximum selling price of "A", and a minimum percentage revenue share of "B", and those numbers are NOT negotiable. Any time I would start to press them on how terribly unacceptable those numbers were, I got a flim-flam, bullshit lecture on the benefits of having locusts pick the meat from your bones. And if I resisted further, the conversation meandered over to some other product or service the business might provide.
Make no mistake; those numbers are FIRM. The pushy twat from Groupon would fall off the radar for a few days, every time we came to an impasse, and I realized after a while that the reason why was because she was shopping other local businesses in my niche, trying to find someone else stupid enough to take the deal (with the horrible percentages that I flat-out rejected). And when she couldn't, she would start calling me again.
They have quotas. The want a (for example) yogurt deal, an oil change deal, a restaurant deal, an AC inspection, etc... A formulated system where all the percentages have already been established by some central authority. All the Groupon Sales team is doing is calling around trying to find businesses stupid enough to cut their own throat at those prices. There is NO "negotiation" at all. You take the shitty deal they offer you, or they change the product/service and offer you another shitty deal.
At one point, when the conversation got somewhat intense, the pushy twat from Groupon slipped and said something to me like, "That's okay, I've already got all the <Product "A"> that I need for the next two months, which at the time made me wonder if I had somehow missed-out on an opportunity. But two months later, a search of Groupon for <my city> + <Product "A"> shows NOTHING, meaning that she couldn't find anyone in my city to cut their throat with the terms Groupon was proposing. But the twat let me believe that we were in some sort of "bidding war" for the privilege of losing $10,000 to Groupon.
But the truth is that no one in my city was willing to do it. With Groupon it's either/or, all or nothing. Either you cut your throat with the deal they offer, or there is "no deal". So don't believe their bullshit about how "soft" those numbers are. Those numbers are HARD, and you either take them or leave them. I suggest you leave them the moment they call you, as they are only looking for suckers stupid enough to believe their bulshit.
And let me be clear. These people KNOW your niche. They KNOW what "fair" is. They know at what point you start to lose money on each transaction. They've got your products & services completely categorized and they have a history of what other businesses have been willing to do. They set a number, and then start calling businesses in your city until they find someone stupid enough to take the deal. I suggest you let that business be one of your competitors, and let THEM get run out of business instead of you.
