Ebay And Walmart's Biggest Threat Is..... Groupon?!?
By: Scot Wingo | Sep 12, 2011 |
There's been so much going on in the world of e-commerce that, unfortunately, I haven't had much time to blog. Over the next couple of days I wanted to share and discuss two big items that I think will have tectonic implications for e-commerce and the incumbent players.
Groupon - changing the game of e-commerce?
The first e-commerce shaking topic I wanted to cover is Groupon's entrance into the marketplace space and it's impact. I'm pretty shocked this has flown under the radar for so long, but I think it's time to really shine a bright light on it as it can and will be pretty big. How big? To quote Justin Timberlake playing the semi-fictional role of Sean Parker from Social Network:
"A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool - a BILLION dollars."
Yes, I think Groupon could quickly siphon $1B+++ out of the e-commerce market. Before we jump into my thesis, here's a brief backgrounder on Groupon.
Groupon - brief backgrounder
- In August in an update to their S1 Groupon disclosed that it's subscriber base had mushroomed up to 115m subscribers.
- Groupon's subscriber base is growing on average 17% m/m (so by the time you read this that 115m is probably more like 134m!
- I can't re-itereate this point enough - Groupon emails 134m globally EVERY DAY. No other company on the planet has that type of daily customer direct touch. Sure FB has 750m users, but they don't have permission to put a deal in front of them every day.
- When I say Groupon, I mean 'the daily deal space which is dominated by Groupon' - the second largest is LivingSocial and they have 30m subscribers. Groupon states that 75% of LS's subscribers are also on Groupon, so there's an incremental 10m or so users on LS and maybe another 20m if you count the 'clones'. Suffice it to say that once Groupon comes out with their offering, every clone will, well, clone that too. LS is already well down the path as you'll see.
- There's a big discussion in the blogosphere around if Groupon is a viable business. Everyone remember 1999 when everyone thought that, 'Sure Amazon sells books to millions of people, but they'll never turn it into a viable business'. I don't want to get into the Groupon viability discussion, but personally, I think Groupon is viable on their business today and has an opportunity to really expand dramatically beyond the 'daily local deal' space if they can continue to drive value for subscribers.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Ebay And Walmart's Biggest Threat Is..... Groupon?!? | iStockAnalyst.com
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