This seems to fall in line with Google's Android strategy of moving functionality out of the core OS and into Apps. This makes updates easier and faster because users only have to download the new version of the app and not update the OS.
This was my favorite part of "In the Plex" by Steven Levey. Sergey and Larry wanted Jobs to be their CEO. They had met with a number of CEO's in Silicon Valley and picked Jobs because of how well he impressed them. Also because he was the “He was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man". Pretty cool if you ask me. RIP STEVE
They were all successful and Groupon is the leader in the space so we figured we would get the most exposure by using them. Despite them being successful there always seemed to be something that went wrong. Groupon tries to sell these things as miscommunications which I don't buy. We have also run deals with living social and twongo. Both of these we not nearly as successful as the Groupon deals we have run.
The problem is that I can't help but get the feeling that Groupon doesn't really care about the success of the merchants business. All they care about is how many Coupons they are going to sell and how much money they are going to make off it.
Another incentive to stay with Groupon is that they have made us a preferred merchant which gives us a couple of advantages i.e. receiving our money from the deal much sooner than the average Groupon merchant.
Yes we are going to use Groupon again and again and again because for our business it has been a major customer acquisition strategy that we have solid numbers to prove is definitely working.
This could not be more true. I have ran three groupon in 3 different markets and although they were successful I felt the Groupon representative I worked with in each case had no idea what was going on. The first time around they sent the wrong coupon codes to everyone and had to resend them. The second time they promised us that we would be the primary deal in our entire region of 250,000 people. We ended up getting sent out to subset of 50,000 people most of whom were not in our coverage area. A similar thing happened with the third Groupon.
The problem in my case seems to be that the Groupon representative is just trying to make the sale and is lacking a lot of operational knowledge.