14 DAY TRIAL // The press has had a love/hate relationship with daily deal sites, of which there are many and many more are being created, and with Groupon in particular. One minute, Groupon is the greatest business ever invented, the next, it's the biggest scam of the year.
There's also been a surge of reports claiming that daily deal sites, again Groupon in particular, are not all they're cracked up to be for the local businesses, the ones these sites depend on.
Plenty of small business owners have complained that, not only they didn't benefit from their deals, they actually lost a lot of money.
Some of those stories are accurate and some of the daily deal sites do take advantage of the unsuspecting and unprepared small businesses.
It could be argued that business owners do their homework better before trying out a special deal, but in the end, all of this may be moot.
Granted, there is a lot of hype surrounding daily deal sites, but there are also a lot of businesses profiting from their deals, otherwise no one would have made it this far, not even Groupon, and there wouldn't be a surge in daily deal sites from startups and big companies alike.
And the same rules of economics apply here just as anywhere, there is competition in the daily deal space and this is going to drive to better terms for both small businesses and users.
One example is that many of the Groupon clones and competitors are offering better terms. Google Offers for example has several advantages over Groupon. Besides the better revenue split, possibly 70/30 rather than Groupon's 50/50, Google also pays businesses faster, 80 percent of the values of the coupons are paid within 4 days and the rest after three months.
This compared to Groupon which pays businesses in three equal installments. Granted, not all of Groupon deals, probably not even most deals, have a 50/50 revenue split not, but this was the case in the early days. But this is also a result of competition.
Google also pays for coupons that have been sold but not redeemed, something Groupon now does as well, but only in the US. Internationally, this doesn't happen, again indicating that stronger competition is forcing Groupon to offer better terms.