Groupon

[NickD]

Anyone come across this?

www.groupon.co.uk

Typical offer:-

http://www.groupon.co.uk/deals/readi...ampaign=Varies

Whatever the business strengths and weaknesses (it has both) attached to the concept, there are some issues with the use of this specifically in the context of applying the discounts needed.

Here's how Groupon works...

1. Supplier (you?) does a deal with Groupon - offers a product at a knock-down price and Groupon advertise it on their website and alert their mailing list (now over 6 MILLION) to it.
2. Customers buy the deal, and receive from Groupon a uniquely numbered voucher.
3. Customer redeems voucher with supplier to obtain product/service.
4. Supplier has to offer discount against voucher code and then cancels code.

I've been trying to work out how best this might be done in Actinic v10 and concluded that coupon codes sort of do what we want here - the problem is that there are potentially thousands of them. A nationwide campaign with Groupon can yield several thousand vouchers sold.

You definitely do not want to be entering those manually. You could have a single global code you give to all buyers, then ask them to furnish their unique code by email or in some other way (delivery instructions box?) but that still involves a fair bit of manual checking. Ideally this could be automated but I don't think that the discount feature is quite there yet - presumably one could do something with the database file outside Actinic.

Has anyone considered Groupon or anything like it, or come across a situation where large numbers of unique coupon codes had somehow to be entered and if so how did they do it?

Or is there perhaps a better way?

Nick

[leehack]

I know about groupon, it's not a bad service. With coupon codes you can put an expiry date on them, so perhaps a global code with a date to finish on is the way forward?

[NickD]

That was my thinking. The vouchers are normally sold within a very limited period - maybe 24 or 48 hours - and have an expiry date - so that bit is easy. It's how to avoid manual checking of unique voucher codes that's the tricky bit.

[Ghome1971]

I am doing a deal with KGB. Not ideal due to the discount we have to offer and the cut they take. However, business is tough so we are giving it a go. My problem is uploading 1000 discount codes. How? Any ideas?

[NickD]

I think use a single coupon code, and track the voucher numbers through a spreadsheet. Trying to upload the codes is too complex - and in any case, is there some upper limit in terms of numbers Actinic will handle? And as the coupon codes are not single-use, the risk of double-use remains.

Sounds like a job for Excel, a printer, and a highlighter pen.

[Duncan Rounding]

This post will interest you: http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=47883

[NickD]

Definitely the highlighter!

[Ghome1971]

The deal I have done is with KGB. Eventually, we decided to use one generic discount code. KGB then send us a list of all the customers and we tick them off one by one as we see their orders. This is not an ideal solution as it relies on us checking off their names to ensure they do not use their code more than once or pass it on to anyone.

Geraldine