Is Groupon Sneaking onto the Scene of Ecommerce?

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September 30, 2011
By the ZippyCart Content Team

Wednesday morning, daily deal site Groupon.com quietly rolled out their latest endeavor: Groupon Goods. Coming just one day after the introduction of Groupon Rewards, a customer loyalty program to officially launch next month, Groupon Goods features discounted direct buy products instead of their usual coupon deals. Unlike Groupon’s other discount offers, Groupon Goods does not feature a deal from another business.

In the company’s own (interesting choice of) words:

Groupon Goods features really good deals on great products. To get airspace on Groupon Goods, a product has to be cool enough to share and innovative enough to inspire. It also must be made of reliably bonded molecules and stardust.

Honestly, if we think a product is remarkable and we can offer a good deal on it, we’ll do so.

Groupon’s venture into the world of ecommerce came with no prior announcements, just a single email to subscribers advertising current Groupon Goods with a small header that read “Introducing Groupon Goods – Products that inspire. Deals that delight”. The site’s inaugural move into online retailing brings an explanation to why the company bought out a series of domain names tied to the words “Groupon Goods” in the past month.

Although it may be a bold move for Groupon, with 134 million email subscribers this ecommerce solution could become a huge source of revenue. It is also necessary for Groupon to move into full-blown ecommerce to compete with discount deal leader, Amazon.com.

Groupon has been forced into competition with the ecommerce solution giant after Amazon bought Woot last year and launched its own deal-of-the-day offering. In addition, Amazon has significantly helped Groupon’s main competitor, LivingSocial, by investing $175 million in the company late last year and then began offering LivingSocial-branded deals through its own offers platform, Amazon Local.

On the heels of a series of setbacks for Groupon, including cutting revenues in half- from $713.4 million in 2010 to only $312.9 million- losing their second COO in less than three years, and canceling their IPO roadshow, the introduction of Groupon Goods and Groupon Rewards seems to be a calculated attempt to attract new customers and merchants and to spark interest in its IPO. Despite the rocky road Groupon has been battling since initially filing for IPO early in the summer, the company remains a strong force in the daily deals market and shows promise with their entrance into the online retail market.