Groublogpon – The Serious Blog of Groupon

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 Stores

With Groupon Stores, businesses can now create and launch their own deals whenever they want. Think of it as the online equivalent of a merchant’s physical storefront. Merchants can now:

• Setup a permanent (and free!) e-commerce presence on Groupon for promoting their business.
• Create their own offers to run deals whenever they want.
• Submit deals to be promoted to Groupon subscribers through email and the Deal Feed (explained below).
• Get customers to follow their Groupon Store, and stay in touch by sending messages through the daily email and deal feed.

Each day we’ll select the best deals from Groupon Stores and match them to customers using our personalization technology. Follow any Store so you’ll never miss a deal from your favorite merchant.

The Deal Feed

To keep track of these extra deals, we created 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.

We’ll be adding tons to the Deal Feed over time, beginning with making it more social: you will be able to connect your feed to Facebook and receive updates on what your friends are doing, such as when your friends buy deals, follow a new merchant or comment on an offer. This will be another fun way to find great offers – or just keep on top of what your friends are up to.

Why we built it

We originally designed Groupon to account for the constraints of being a small company. Since we didn’t have any merchant relationships, we limited ourselves to one deal per day. Today things are different – our biggest problem is that demand is so high, merchants often wait months to be featured. And while we once only had a few thousand customers per city, now we have hundreds of thousands (Chicago just added its millionth subscriber!) – making it increasingly difficult to find one deal that satisfies everyone.

Personalization, Stores, and the Deal Feed are our attempt to re-imagine things. How would we have built Groupon if we started with hundreds of thousands of relationships with the best merchants in the world, millions of customers, and a world-wide operation with thousands of people helping merchants create deals? With these new features, we can feature more merchants and deliver a more relevant experience for customers, while maintaining the curated, serendipitous and simple experience that’s at the core of Groupon.

Coming soon to your city

We’ll start testing these features today in Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle, with plans to add more cities and functionality soon. If you’re in one of those markets, check out the link to the deal feed in your header and let us know what you think.

To learn more, please visit the FAQ pages for merchants and customers.

During the holidays, many retailers offer promotions designed to cynically cash in on holiday imagery. At Groupon, we believe that the holidays – not spending money – are most important. That’s why instead of a holiday promotion, Groupon offers customers an entire holiday: Grouponicus.

Celebrating Grouponicus is simple! Followers purchase Groupons as gifts – giving their loved ones meals at restaurants, dazzling beauty treatments, helicopter rides, and more, all at 50-90% off. Customers can subscribe to receive Grouponicus emails, or buy directly from the Grouponicus gift store. Deals last 3-5 days, but Grouponicus lasts for five whole weeks online, and all year long in our hearts. Embracing Grouponicus is the adventurous alternative to holiday gifting, and like all good holidays, Grouponicus comes with a fun set of age-old traditions and rigid cosmological beliefs.

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We are excited to announce that our mobile redemption tracking apps are now available for download from Apple’s App Store or the Android Marketplace. Our goal was to make it dead simple for merchants to redeem and track Groupons. If you are already a Groupon merchant, simply download one of the mobile apps, sign-in with your merchant credentials and your master list of Groupons will be downloaded to your mobile phone.

Once the Groupons are downloaded to your phone, all you have to do is scan the barcode on each Groupon that a customer brings in, with your phone’s camera. The app will log the Groupon as redeemed and automatically update our online database. You can also use the app to track additional information such as the total amount each customer spent.

If you don’t have an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone you can talk to your Groupon representative about leasing one. You can get more information about redemption on Grouponworks. Give the apps a try and let us know how we can improve them.