Group Buying fortunes on the up?

Posted on by Billy Tucker

After bottoming out during the past few months, the fortunes of some Group Buying businesses seem to be on the up, albeit a significant number have collapsed or been acquired in the past six months and the outlook remains grave for many more!

The fact that the sector’s nose is slightly up is in part due to the weeding out of weaker and often less scrupulous competitors who often served only to undermine the reputation of the sector as a whole.

In fact out of the 50 largest Group Buying businesses assessed in April, only 29 remain intact just 6 months on. And given only 10% (5) of those businesses were acquired that supports the view that smaller Group Buying businesses are of limited real value. In such a crowded and undifferentiated market lifesaving investment is tricky too given a lack of brand equity, good will or asset strength (off the shelf web sites are common and subscriber base overlap with top-tier competitors is often well over 70%) resulting in the collapse of underperforming and debt laden Group Buying businesses.

A quick browse through the sites of the 29 still standing uncovered indicators of pending doom for some.

Here are the choking canaries of the Group Buying world:

  • A high degree of niche product deals, such as robotic vacuum cleaners or iPad accessories
  • No sign of “number purchased”, an essential component of Group Buying that is quickly discarded when numbers are low
  • Extended Deal deadlines, this industry was founded on deal a day for good reason!
  • A smorgasbord of deals on one page, suggesting desperate recycling of old offers

Group Buying remains a $1bn future industry in Australia, regardless if that industry seemed to lose its way and stall when it was only half way there. Regaining lost momentum will be down to the leading players showing the way once again with a combination of brilliant marketing and a commitment to helping consumers discover great business products.

The strongest already have their playbook (Living Social, Cudo and Ourdeal) and will extend their positions in the coming 6 months through a focus on back-to-basics Group Buying offers like quality restaurants, high value vacation offers and utility products such as Cudo’s Meat Merchant.

Although I suspect another 15 from April’s top 50 will be gone by April 2013, leaving only a dozen or so standing, I think I already know who they are, I wonder if they do?

Is your business suffering a Group Buying Hangover?

Posted on by Billy Tucker

Group Buying helped good businesses access revenues that had previously eluded them, improving utilisation, buoying their P&L and promising a sustainable new revenue stream from this exciting new consumer channel.

But now that the sector has waned and desperate Group Buying businesses have become fixated on stack ‘em high sell ‘em low product chuff – those once buoyed businesses are left feeling a little queasy.

Just one of the problems they face stems from prepayment, one of the headline benefits touted by most group buying companies (including me).

Although quick access to cash is manna from heaven for most business owners, prepayment has left behind a tequila-like side effect.

The problem is this. A top priority for all online businesses should be around Funnel Conversion, i.e. the ability for the business to convert leads into dollars, however in a world of prepayment, conversion becomes somewhat unimportant. In fact, if breakage (unused vouchers) is a profitable exercise for the merchant, higher conversion may actually mean lower short term profits.

Now that Group Buying is providing an ever declining proportion of revenues, many online businesses that signed up to breakeven or lossmaking campaigns in order to grow their subscriber base, now find they are unable to monetize that base due to poor site performance, especially in the area of conversion.

Faced with lower than expected revenues, these companies often head back to Group Buying to find that like-for-like offers work only half as well as they did before. Now the business is in a pickle, the drug is half as effective, risk its brand by doing twice as much? Surely you know your drug dealer is never your friend?

The key is to get the fundamentals of your businesses working right before looking to Group Buying or any type of Marketing for that matter. Ensure that the purchase funnel is converting 60% or more of the people who hit “Buy Now”, that your Subscription Channel is effective, and your email strategy is delivering appropriate Open, Click and Purchase rates.

When cloaked by the shiny veneer of Group Buying dollars your site performance will look a whole lot better than it really is. Time to sober up, shake off that hangover and see if your bedfellow looks as good as you remember.

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The seismic shift toward Online

Posted on by Billy Tucker

I met with Business Spectator’s Alan Kohler and recorded an interview for Qantas inflight Radio in June. I was flattered to be invited to the show, the interview is now available below.

A link to the file is here.

Alan was particularly interested in a topic I have spoken about on a  number of occasions, the slow but steady adoption of the internet by all but the most tech-resistant and the impact that shift is having on traditional commerce.

Now that over 3/4 of the Australian population have a connection to the web, businesses of all types are finding that their typical customer is spending an increasing amount of time online and can be reached there quite cheaply for Brand building as well as ecommerce.

Two other significant factors beyond the amount of people online are – the nature of connectivity, i.e. fast connection speeds are no longer the preserve of early adopters – and that almost all internet users are willing to shop online, with only 5% of internet users showing concern about online security.

The shift towards fast access speeds has been so rapid that in 5 short years the issue of access for all has all but disappeared. Mobile internet use has also accelerated with many online businesses signalling that 10% or more of page impressions are from mobile devices and mobile transactions are catching up fast.

Where the online activities of the older demographics were once limited to banking and email, this is no longer the case. Over 20% of the discount shopping audience is 60+ suggesting that older folks enjoy the process of shopping online even if they don’t have to.

I think it’s fair to say that not being online in 2012 is akin to not having a mobile phone, at some point it looks a bit weird!

Meanwhile, as the Internet population has swelled to include your parents and most their friends, technology has evolved that enables Advertisers to single out their target customer and provide a customised offer on the fly – further extending the economic advantage of online commerce.

For the first ten years of the web the economic engine that powered its growth was display advertising (And subscription Porn but that’s another post!), publishers funded their growth by making money from page impressions – a refit of the existing TV and Magazine advertising model. In 2000 Google started selling ads in a new way – through search keywords which provided advertisers with a way to talk to customers based on what they were looking for, rather than what they had already found.

Now the model is shifting again, more people and more data means that publishers are now making an increasing portion of revenues from who you are, rather than just your location on the web. publishers can connect advertisers with their target Market with reasonable precision using browser tags. No longer are marketers confused about which half of their dollars are wasted, in the new world of the Internet, they spend half as much and almost none is wasted.

The rapid shift towards a more personal web has occurred in the past couple of years and the pace of change is accelerating. It was only 5 years ago that Facebook emerged as a public service, touching a Billion or so lives since.

The amount of change we see in the next 5 years will be as dramatic as the last 5, with an even greater emphasis on devices, mobility, personalisation and online commerce, bring on 2017!