14 DAY TRIAL // While the rumors of a possible Google buyout continue to pour in, Groupon is making several big moves of its own. It's introducing the biggest update to the site and the business model since launch and it's also acquiring three group-buy startups in Asia.
"This summer, we launched personalization to bring you deals that better suit your interests. We weren’t about to stop there – today, we’re giving you a sneak peak of some new stuff that will bring you even more deals you love: Groupon Stores and the Deal Feed," Groupon CEO Andrew Mason announced.
Groupon Stores is a self-service option for businesses wanting to manage their own deals. Restaurants, stores and so on can set up their own Groupon Stores and offer discounted deals whenever they want.
Normally, Groupon offers just one deal per city per day. It has been expanding on this, with several deals for bigger cities or personalized deals, but the model is still fairly limited in the number of deals it can run at the same time.
This focus helped the site take off initially but is now becoming a problem in cities with hundreds of thousands of users and hundreds or thousands of businesses wanting offer deals.
Businesses can be put on hold for months until their deal can be run in their city. With Groupon Stores, more deals can be available, while still maintaining one deal per day on the main page.
What's more, Groupon's take on these deals is as low as 10 percent, as opposed to 50 percent which is what it normally charges for deals.
Users can also 'follow' a business, Twitter-style, to see when it may have a special deal. This is the second big feature for Groupon, the Deal Feed.
"This is a new section of Groupon where a stream of deals – personalized for you – is updated throughout the day. Your deal feed includes your featured daily deal, deals posted by merchants you follow, and deals posted by merchants that we recommend based on what we know about you," Mason explained.
The new features are still in testing and are available in Chicago, Dallas and Seattle with other cities coming soon. The timing of announcement may be coincidental, but with all the rumors of the Google acquisition, it could be a way of showing that Groupon has a long-term strategy and that it may very well be the future of local e-commerce.