I spoke to a Yahoo spokesperson late last night about Offers to get a better sense of the program. It seems like a bunch of execution decisions have yet to be made. But at least for now there doesn’t appear to be a coupon or deals destination contemplated.
So I was technically wrong in characterizing Yahoo as a deals aggregator. At least not yet.
There is an existing Yahoo Deals and some of the partner content from Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot, BuyWithMe, etc., may appear there. But I didn’t get the sense that it would all be collected in one place. It sounded like Yahoo was going to sprinkle these deals throughout its sites and treat them like display ads: geotargeting, behavioral targeting them, showing them in Yahoo Mail.
Nothing was ruled out but it’s a bit curious to me that Yahoo isn’t creating a place where consumers can go to browse deals. Of course they can browse the existing Yahoo Deals but if it doesn’t house the full range of content announced yesterday Yahoo won’t be delivering full value to consumers in my view.
I would encourage Yahoo to create a full-fledged deals destination.
November 17th, 2010 at 6:08 pm
GroupOn is a brilliant model. Unfortunately, they failed on customer service and sales. I know of 6 companies including my own that were unable to reach them and run any kind of GroupOn campaign. The CrowdCoupon model is the next big targeting idea, but it may be short lived There is a point that if everyone is using the coupon then the real price is just the same as the coupon price. In order for coupons to work they must have value. The coupon systems must also have a verification process. Just as PPC ads are full of false promises, so too are many of the GroupOn coupons. The classic, mark it up 80% and offer a 50% off coupon. Still, there will be a boom with CrowdCoupons and when Facebook gets into the act, I blelieve it will be more than coupons, it will be like evite.com and Meetup.com smashed into Groupon.com and tapped into the facebook community. Organize and event, invite, meetup and negotiate the best deal. It can move from consumer to business or from Business to Consumer.
November 17th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
That’s apparently the way it happens in China; people show up as a group at a shop for the deal. That pre-dates all the current action in the group buying space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuangou
November 17th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Greg Sterling, Stanley Gauss. Stanley Gauss said: RT @gsterling: The Curious Case of Yahoo Offers http://bit.ly/boaHnh [...]
November 21st, 2010 at 5:21 pm
For sure Greg there are many “New models” that have become big news created by “Internet gurus”, that are really old business models, the internet simply did not have the throughput or adaption rate to make these ideas work. Now their time has come. Did we really think it would take that long for a YouTube service to come about? In 94 I thought it would be a year or two, not 10! Coupons online, twitter messages, UNIX anyone? Just goes to show that simple tried and true ideas of the past are still yet to realize their full potential online. Call it “social marketing” if you will, but the more people become connected and bandwidth increases the more these “no duh” ideas become realistic business ventures. The entertainment guide as to be kicking themselves for missing this boat!!!
November 22nd, 2010 at 1:22 pm
[...] distribute “daily deals” and related offers from multiple sources. While there’s apparently no single deals destination contemplated at the moment — there is a pre-existing deals tab within Yahoo Shopping — [...]