Canadian Webhosting Forums

[kevin]

Groupon.com reaches 1 billion market cap after another round of private investment.
Other web 2.0 billion club are Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga (makers of Mafia Wars and Farmville).

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/18/its-of ... ion-round/
http://mashable.com/2010/04/18/groupon-valuation/

Basically, this site is based on the concept of group buying. Once you get a big buying group, retailers will offer discounts.
This startup goes to local businesses and asks them for deals like 50% off at restaurants for their user base and then gets a cut of the sale. However, in order to get the 50% off discount, there needs to be a minimum number of people willing
to purchase the meal. In effect, they are getting the people to tell their friends about it (Facebook, Twitter, etc). Viral marketing. Simply brilliant! For the deals that accrue enough interest, Groupon collects the money from the users, distributes a group coupon (a “groupon”) to them and sends a check the participating business, keeping a fee for the transaction. Most of their staff are sales people going out to local businesses to find deals.

They have a deal a day similar to Dell deal a day but it runs almost 365 days a year!

This company started up in Nov 2008 and now has over 300 employees and rapidly expanding.

Recently, they bought out a German competitor that started out in Jan 2010 and has offers in 80 European countries. However they have over 600 employees!

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/groupo ... -citydeal/

I tried the service and it's decent. There are deals on massages, spas, restaurants, river rafting, etc! Currently, it's only available in Toronto and Vancouver but it will rapidly expand to other Canadian cities.

There are other copycats already in the Canadian scene.

http://www.livingsocial.com

There are already companies looking for developers to get into this space:

http://www.freelancer.com/projects/PHP- ... oupon.html
http://www.elance.com/php/search/main/e ... ds=groupon

Wall Street Journal Review of Sites

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 14862.html

Vancouver Sun article on local group buying startup

http://www.vancouversun.com/Vancouver+s ... story.html

Do you know of any other group buying sites?

[markshah2]

Now they have issue there initial public offerings.They are doing great job.Non one can progress like them