Currently Groupon requires our TTD Partners to configure, store and send Merchant specific pricing and availability to Groupon so that we can form a transaction with a customer on our side. This requires complex setup, storage of specific Groupon-Merchant pricing configurations and as a result is costly to maintain. Our coming release of Groupon Independent Pricing will remove much of this friction through taking partial or total ownership of pricing configurations, while still integrating over availability and capacity management.
Introducing a partially integrated pricing model for Groupons Merchants will be done via the valuePrice field. Allowing Groupon to ingest the market rate for a deal directly from a Merchant, via our Partners, to seamlessly create percentage discounted deals (i.e. 10% off) or full price deals (i.e. 0% off). The Merchant has the ability to change the market rate that they charge for a service and that price will automatically be reflected in Groupon with no added effort from the Merchant, Groupon or our Partners.
With this release Groupon will have three ways of integrating prices through an integration; Partner Managed Pricing, Dynamic Market Pricing and Groupon Independent Pricing.
Note - While a Partner may integrate with Groupon at the Partner Managed Pricing level, it is possible that a specific Merchant wants Groupon to own pricing entirely (requiring no pricing integration at all). The below styles of integrations can be thought of as Merchant use cases a Partner can service, rather than a Partner being locked into one of the choices below.
Partner Managed Pricing
This style of integration matches how Groupon does business today and is suited, but not mandatory, for Channel Managers that need total control of pricing. Mimicking contractual terms agreed between Groupon and a Merchant or through a Distribution agreement is the basis for this style or integration. It will require data in the above table to Groupon
Dynamic Market Pricing
Many of our Merchants want to synchronize their market rate offerings between their booking providers and Groupon, so that if a change is made in one system it is reflected in another. Servicing this use case requires only the value price to be integrated with Groupon and allows for Groupon to have an independent contractual agreement with the Merchant based on percentage margins, which significantly lowers the setup and maintenance effort. Groupon expects that this style of integration will become our most popular due to the easy use of the Merchant. It will require data in the above table to Groupon
Groupon Independent Pricing
Finally, Groupon also has the ability to entirely service a contractual arrangement with a Merchant without the need for any external pricing data. Only availability is needed to manage capacity for the Merchant. While this use case is possible we do still suggest that the valuePrice field is included in the integration as it will allow any Partner to service both Dynamic Market Pricing and Groupon Independent pricing.
