Couponing is powerful and been around forever. Women love coupons and they will be around. Group on was smart and found a powerful way to get coupons to the masses via the web, text, and email. This is not a trend!

The problem with Google is they have never been good at customer service. Group On and Living Social rely mostly on Women that are looking for deals when they need something, or that buy something they don’t really need because of a deal. That is the power of perceived good deals!

You need to build strong relationships with the businesses and the end users. That may be Google’s failing point. They certainly have the platform to take it to the market. Google has never been known to give great customer service.

The problem is… businesses are willing to give discounts, but may not want to use 3 services. Many of their offers are not very profitable just geared to create repeat business.

Second… Women are used to Group On and it may be hard to move them to Google. Group on is becoming a household name.

This is a good thing for small businesses because competition for their business will lead to these coupon services giving them better deals resulting in better profits per coupon offer.

My gut feeling is that Google because of their lack of people skills and customer service etiquette will not overtake Group on.

Google will dwindle down the value of Groupon over a few years. Then the offer from Google will be based on closing down the competition rather than an out-of-the-box opportunity for Google to build on. Dollars flying out the window

Groupon is very selective in which offers they accept. I have a few customers that have legit companies, yet groupon constantly decline their requests with lame excuses. Hopefully Offers will be less selective

Groupon and its competitors are meteors, not comets. Their bright lights will fade away soon enough just as cash rebates did a few years ago. Here’s why: Prices of goods and services, at least in well managed companies, are based on margin and ROI targets. Promotions can be used to introduce products to new customers and to inflate sales during weak periods of annual sales cycles. But, promotions can also distort those cycles, stealing sales from the future. Later, when the high ends of the cycles don’t perform as usual, there’s a tendency to introduce more promotions. In categories such as entertainment, that’s a dangerous move. No matter how many promotions are in place, customers will only go horseback riding or kayaking so many times. Restaurants with diners who pay discounted prices every time they visit feel the pain very quickly. In package goods and other inventory based businesses, too much promotion can lower the perceived value of the brand. If you need an average price of $1.00 to maintain profitability and the market sees your promotional price of 80 cents too often, they’ll refuse your dollar offering and either buy volume when your price is low or simply wait until the next promotion.

In a year, Groupon el al will be around but will see its own, over stimulated market diminish. When that happens the $6 billion offer will seem enormous!

I think Groupon should have taken the offer. In my opinion, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to find out how much smaller of an offer is still on the table, as it may not be too late. It appears, at least to me, that Google is at the very beginning stages of becoming the dominant player in local reach. At the end of the day, in almost every change seen, aside from maybe Facebook (the single most significant threat), Google seems to be the ‘buzz’ word, and is unlikely to change much in the coming years.

I think that unfortunately that Google has the resources and funding to out market Groupons. I think Google will be a leader in that market as they are in others. But I also think it will be short lived as other companies have experienced when they grew too fast. I hope that they can keep up the customer service that these other companies have. Have you tried to call Google with a problem?? They don’t make it easy to contact them and that could be their downfall.

This is only really going one way, and it’s the same way everything involving Google goes (or at least 70+% of the time): in Google’s favor.

As the article has noted, they’ve already got a massive foothold in local and they can leverage all their strength and presence to do what Groupon doesn’t yet have the ability to do.

I think Groupon will be around long term, but Google Offers will certainly move to the fore.

I’m excited to see what Google will do in this space. They obviously have lots of resources and potential, but I think it will be awhile before they are really able to compete with Groupon or LivingSocial. Hopefully they will be able to offer something that’s unique or different… seems like almost all of the daily deal sites operate in the same Groupon model with little variation. Since the ‘Groupon’ concept is so well known now, I’m sure they are hoping they can find a way to have businesses come to them (like they do for Adwords) rather than having to staff up a huge salesforce like Groupon has.

I started LocalDealSites.com as a daily deal site directory, currently with 159 sites and the ability to filter by city. If you love daily deals, check it out: http://www.localdealsites.com

Though Google seems too big a rival to GroupOn but the event of ever pushing out GroupOn is at a far distance. Why? Because Google is new to deals. The same is applicable to FaceBook too. Agreed that it would be difficult for GroupOn as the competition is going to be too heavy. But Google has less chances of overtaking GroupOn until it partners with Foursquare and till then GroupOn is safe.

Given the past social failures of other Google products it is hard to say if Google Offers will be a success.

Let me get this right, Groupon declined $6 billions for a business concept that is not proprietary and no barriers for entry. Heck, I am not a geek, I could get some brains stationed in India to replicate Groupon with have my data farm in Google fiber heaven, Kansas,KS. Those guys must have drank too much of their Jim Jones Cool Aid.