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Groupon and the 4 P's

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Product The Groupon product is certainly categorized best as an innovative product. Groupon was the first to enter the “deals” market in a world of social commerce. Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce that involves the use of social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services. While Groupon isn’t the first company to use social commerce in their distribution strategy, however, they are the first company to introduce “deals” within social commerce. In 2004, Woot.com was launched offering a deal a day, however, it was a modified version of earlier dot-com-bubble sales like Ubid.com which focused on technology related products. In …show more content…

So, Groupon will need to decide if the large dollars spent on advertising is a sustainable approach as merchants reevaluate if doing a Groupon is worth it for the boost in promotion. Lastly, Groupon relies on online word-of-mouth promotion to virally spread across the web as customers share it with friends using tools like Facebook and Twitter, to further increase a company’s brand exposure. Price As an innovator, Groupon and its approach to pricing has been one of skimming which involves the introduction of a product at a high price and then later, the price is decreased as the market becomes saturated. As more and more competitors enter the deal market, Groupon will have to adjust this strategy to maintain market share. As the market place becomes saturated with competitors like Google Offers, Facebook Deals, Yelp Deals and others, Groupon’s challenge is retaining heavily discounted deals at 50-70% off the market price, while still attracting the right merchants to promote a deal with Groupon instead of a competitor. The skimming pricing approach is a strength to Groupon as they have increased profits and operations faster than any other company in e-commerce; however, as the market place shifts, Groupon has to restructure their pricing and potentially reduce the percentage of profits received from each deal. They began to do this when they started offering more than one deal a day. Originally, with only one deal per

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