Techcruch reports on an interesting story on one of Groupon's latest deals that had it selling $40 worth of credit for FTD (Flower company in US) for $20. Except, when Groupon customers compared prices that were accessible via the coupon and those without, they found that they were being gouged on prices.
The comments on Techcrunch read very similar to the complaint threads on here with businesses not holding up their end of the deal.
I think the first comment quite interesting:
when groupon called me and wanted to run a http://socialprintshop.com deal, their sales rep basically told me to double the price of my product for a month to make things work for me giving a 50% off deal. Living Social did the exact same thing, as did another deal site that reached out to me. Living social only required me to lower the price for 1 week after the deal ended.
That just sounds dodgy.
I thought the same but it may just be an inflammatory statement to promote his business. Would have been easy to make the point without blantly throwing the URL in the middle of the statement.
Yeah I first saw the link (to the TechCrunch comment) submitted to Hacker News here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206911
The link at the top of the page goes directly to that TechCrunch comment, so I thought it's pretty trust worthy as it has been voted up on Hacker News.
wow
although they paid $20 for a $40 gift card/store credit, where the Groupon customers paid the RRP, whereas the regular customers paid the $10 discounted flowers(as mentioned by Carolina) , although this is unfair, the Groupon users still get $10 off of what the regular customers are getting, so in other words they are realistically paying $20 for $30 regular customer store credit
this is basically similar to one of another thread, where, a business (bought from a group deal) had a call service for regular members and one for the group deal buyers
as in, if you are a regular full paying customer, leave a voice mail
if you are a group deal buyer, hang up
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/39214#comment-383755