Groupon Mania in Germany

It is quite interesting that the first Groupon clones not have been launched earlier (it was presented in Germany at the live shopping days already in February 2009). But now, after Groupon got a solid funding ($30m) at an interesting valuation ($250m), almost every day a new clone is starting. So by the end of the month we might see at least 10 approaches out there. I wish everyone company all the best with their product.

But the most important thing will be not only getting the customers to the site and buy a coupon. The deals itself are the most important factor. Who cares about a saving of €5 (even though it might be a 50% discount) and how much can a Groupon clone earn with such a deal? A successful service needs to control the deal acquisition costs as well as getting exciting deals (why should I buy a coupon for a dinner at a restaurant I don’t know? BTW: this could easily be covered by Qype that already offers a coupons solution which could be used for a Groupon service). For exciting deals I need a long term customer acquisition agreement with my supplier. This means that I might need only to agree once on a deal that than can be used four times a year in several cities. Furthermore there are many different ways to differentiate the offerings on a site.

It will be very interesting to see how the situation might look like by the end of the year. Personally it shows to me that there are currently not enough really new and interesting ideas out there about the web scene could talk about.

Groupon Clones so far:

• DailDeal

They already received a decent Angel funding (Stefan Glänzer among others) and start to advertise their service on StudiVZ (still bigger in Germany than facebook). Currently they operate in Hamburg and Berlin.

• MyCityDeal

A Rocket Internet investment (know as the start up incubator from the Samwer Bros.). This means that they will push their service within the next month heavily.

• Heimatpreis
• CouponMania
• Dailypon
• UnserDeal

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