Thursday, August 25, 2011

To Group Coupon Or Not: Small Business Guide to Groupon, Google Offers, LivingSocial and Others (To Groupon or not)


If you are a small business owner, selling products like specialty cakes or in services business like running a spa, whether you have heard about group buying or not, used one of these sites in the past for running your promotion or considering using them in the near future, this book is for you.

This book helps you decide whether or not running a promotion on Groupon or similar site is an economically superior option or not. The methods are purely based on numbers and economics and not on my opinions or biases. Informed decision making based on numbers and data is hard but the alternative threatens the very viability of your business.

Decision making gets harder when all the costs are not explicit and how the options are presented to us affect our decision making process. This book brings out the hidden costs that most do not always consider, like opportunity cost, and helps you cast aside anchors and framing influences that cloud your decision making.

Consider this, if you plan to give away 2000 units of your product that is usually priced at $100 for a discounted price of $50, and give another $25 to the Group Coupon site, should you not take the time to understand the final and lasting outcome of such a promotion and whether or not it is better than all other options?

For a price that is less than the cost of an average group coupon promotion, or less than one half of one percent of your total promotion spend, this book will not only help you avoid costly promotion mistakes but also will help you understand how and when to successfully employ it to take advantage of it.

This book is not a course in business management, economics, marketing or on how to run your business. But the principles shown here are rooted in business management and are no different from the business methods used by large corporations when they decide on marketing and product investments.



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