Message from CEO Kedar Deshpande: Where We Landed & What’s Ahead | 2022 In Review
December 19, 2022
Last week, I celebrated my one-year anniversary at Groupon. I shared some of my thoughts with our global employees on the numerous accomplishments we’ve made together in executing our turnaround strategy to become THE destination for Local as well as the road ahead.
This month marked an important milestone for me personally – my one-year anniversary at Groupon. When I joined the team last December, I was excited about the potential our marketplace has to give our 20+ million customers memories that can last a lifetime.
There is no question that we have faced both expected and unexpected challenges and had to make difficult decisions, however, our team has also accomplished so much together. And I’m even more excited about where the Groupon marketplace is headed than when I started. I’m motivated by the potential of the Groupon marketplace, and by all the progress our team has made this year executing our turnaround strategy to become THE destination for Local.
We’ve been moving fast to test, learn and scale new initiatives – all with the goal of improving Local purchase frequency. The journey to transform our marketplace will not be a straight path but rather a winding road with twists, bumps and even a few detours along the way. We’ve just begun our journey together, but looking back at 2022, I can see the green shoots of success. I am confident that the meaningful improvements we need to make to our inventory and customer experience are within reach. Let me remind you of how far we have come, starting with bringing more and better inventory to our marketplace:
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We’ve reoriented our supply acquisition strategy to focus on acquiring and retaining inventory in geographies and verticals that we believe will drive incremental consumer demand and satisfy customer intent. |
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We’re leveraging merchant marketing to help acquire and deepen merchant partnerships at scale. |
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We’re utilizing self-service to onboard merchants, particularly smaller ones, at scale. |
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We’ve launched our Card Linked Offers partnership, which added more than 10k Dining merchants to our NA marketplace this past autumn. Dining is a high engagement vertical (you likely eat more than you go to concerts, trampoline parks, etc.), and we are excited by CLO’s potential to drive increased engagement and purchase frequency. |
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Having the right Supply density is key to ensuring customers can use our marketplace multiple times a month, which I believe will encourage customers to think Groupon whenever they are considering doing anything Local. |
Of course, we are a two-sided marketplace, so as we make improvements to our inventory, we must also continue to enhance our customer experience. I have said it many times before, but it bears repeating – trust must be a cornerstone of our marketplace – and we have done a lot to help customers understand the integrity and value proposition of the Groupon marketplace. From our pricing review, to our work with high refunding merchants to our recently-launched Best Price Guarantee in NA Local, we are looking at a variety of opportunities to strengthen the foundational layer of trust between Groupon and consumers around the world.
We have also become even more thoughtful about how we leverage promotions such as item level discounts and Groupon Bucks Back campaigns with a focus on using these tools to better capitalize on our horizontal marketplace. One of our goals is to figure out how we can successfully entice our customers to use Groupon to find and purchase a broader variety of their local services and experiences – expanding from purchases in just one vertical to two or more, and ultimately use our marketplace more frequently. And what’s more, we want to achieve this goal in a manner that generates a positive return for our partners and Groupon.
Last but certainly not least, we’re using machine learning to improve Search & Relevance, which will be a driver of better customer experience over time. We have to do a better job surfacing the right inventory to the right customer at the right time. Similar to trust, this is foundational to a good customer experience on the Groupon marketplace. Our new taxonomy based search should lead to more consistently relevant search results: when a customer searches for Mexican Food, we will be showing them actual Dining supply, perhaps they will be discounted deals or Card Linked Offers, but regardless the search results will be more aligned with customer intent. We won’t be showing them novelty t-shirts, oil changes, or other unrelated inventory. We believe this can become an important driver of conversion rates and purchase frequency.
As we look ahead to 2023, we think these initiatives will create tailwinds as they continue to “take root” and we remain confident that we are doing the work necessary to fundamentally improve our marketplace value proposition and grow our Local category in 2023. Our focus next year will be to continue building a fundamentally better marketplace. One with the right supply in key markets to delight customers, and a best-in-class customer experience that consistently surfaces the inventory customers want. We plan to back up our value proposition with strong customer service that offers, among other things, full refund options. One-time buyers help quarterly sales, but we must be focused on retaining customers and encouraging them to come back again and again. If we can make consumers understand the power of our marketplace from their first experience with us, we will unlock the potential of Groupon. This is why purchase frequency is our North Star KPI, and the ultimate indicator that our strategy is working.
To everyone reading today; thank you. Thank you for your continued commitment to Groupon. I hope you can all take some time off this holiday season, get the rest that you need, and make new memories and experiences with your loved ones. I want you to come back rested and ready to continue working on our vision for Groupon’s future. To achieve our vision, we will need to be Focused. Resilient. Innovative. Entrepreneurial. But most of all, we’ll need to be a team that works and learns together. A team that is single-minded when it comes to reaching our goals. I look forward to working with you to bring our vision to life.
Happy Holidays Grouponers,
-Kedar
