Groupon Development revelation: Group buying will not die but evolution

Groupon, the March Groupon, has announced the departure of the company's founder and CEO Mason, which represents the end of the founders ' era and, more importantly, Groupon has quietly completed the transformation of its business model, no longer just a group buying site. It can be seen that Groupon is gradually abandoning its "Groupon model" and Turning to fab mode. Fab is a designer-level flash-shopping site that sells goods at a very high discount. Two companies actually do similar jobs, but Fab only sells physical goods, while Groupon sells physical goods, services, and experiences.

From Groupon's point of view, the transition is like a homeopathic one, with more than half of Groupon's local deals coming from the "Deal Bank", a long-term offer from Groupon for local merchants. The previous daily group buying information model is declining, with less than 50% of the total number of email-driven transactions sent by daily offers.

Groupon is the ancestor of the group purchase site, but also in the capital market performance of the most outstanding group purchase site, it is because of the success of Groupon, only to trigger the year before the domestic buy thousand sail race situation. Group purchase itself is sufficient market value, through the convenient way for consumers to more affordable access to products, services, experience, which is the value of the core purchase. This makes group buying look beautiful, after all, the vast majority of people want to be more economical to get what they want-to spend less money to get the same product, which in itself can bring happiness; because of the existence of the buying platform, the merchant can obtain many consumer users, although it is necessary to offer a certain discount to the goods, But the discount itself is a necessary marketing tool; The group-buying service gets a certain amount of commission throughout the business process. This is a three-win situation, there is a complete business model, it seems that group buying is a smooth road.

The fact that group buying website has been struggling, as intermediary service providers, on the one hand, to converge enough, have enough attractive goods, services, experience; On the other hand, we need to gather the user groups with high activity and high consumption frequency. This determines the promotion, operation is the basis of group buying site, Need to get enough market share in a short time.

The first two years of domestic major group buying sites eager to recruit, in various cities set up a separate station. At the same time, group buying website make every effort to increase the number of cooperative merchants as much as possible in major cities. Due to entry threshold low, a large number of sites into the group buying market, leading to vicious competition. In order to preempt a larger market in a short time, group buying sites often take the way of horse racing, blind expansion. This practice brings three major drawbacks: one is the Web site operating funds tight, easy to lead to a broken capital chain. Second, the quality of cooperative merchants is uneven, resulting in more and more consumer disputes. Third, blind rapid expansion leads to short service, consumer satisfaction is poor. This circle of people, Circle market model to buy the site in two years, from the peak to the trough, most of the group purchase site is unsustainable, the remaining group buying is also seeking transformation.

No matter how the group purchase site transformation, one thing is certain, shopping itself is a rigid demand, the value of the network is to provide more excellent goods, more competitive prices, experience a better shopping process. On this basis, for different groups of people to achieve service segmentation, whether O2O, Flash purchase is through the geographical subdivision, consumer segmentation to serve different user groups. Just like group buying is a subdivision of online shopping, group buying will also be in the service object, service domain, service mode on the subdivision, some group purchase may only do online interactive localization services, some may tend to shopping information services, some may go to social shopping, some focus on the vertical area of group buying. All these are just to provide consumers with more practical services, as long as the sincere provision of services to bring users the real value of consumption, buy will not perish, will only evolve.