People

As the world reopens, Groupon’s pushing to be much more than a deals site

The daily deals platform is now trying to be a full-on "local experiences" system.

Photos of Groupon's redesigned app

Groupon is redesigning its app to offer more personalization.

Photo: Groupon

The pandemic was not kind to Groupon. Which isn't terribly surprising, given that the company makes money by helping local businesses sell things like massages, manicures, escape rooms and housework. As COVID-19 forced people to retreat into their homes, the market dried up.

But the world is beginning to reemerge, and Groupon seems to sense an opportunity. Not just to get back to where it was, but to make a crucial and complicated switch from daily-deals site to an all-in-one platform for local experiences. To be the place users go not just to splurge on a massage on vacation, but to hire their house cleaners and book all their workout classes. Groupon estimates that people have about 80 "Grouponable" moments a year, CTO John Higginson said, and right now only buy a few of them on Groupon. He'd like to change that.

Groupon is redesigning its app to offer more personalization, as the company begins to invest in machine learning to help figure out what users might want to do and buy in a more detailed way. It's also improving search and rankings to make things easier to find.

But the most significant change, at least in terms of Groupon's whole reason for existence, is the app's new tools for quickly buying deals you've already bought. That would once have been anathema to Groupon's entire purpose, and the platform wouldn't even allow it. Groupon was the place to discover new things, not a way to get better deals at the places you already know.

Groupon has been working with merchants for months to try to make repeat buying work. It relaxed some of the rules on what and how a business can sell through Groupon, and gave them new tools for doing things that look a lot less like flashy coupons. The platform helps merchants figure out pricing and timing, but ultimately leaves things up to the business. "If you had been going to a hair salon for a deal they had that's, like, a complete makeover," Higginson said, "now we want that salon to be able to advertise and promote services for everyday haircuts or coloring. You can do that on Groupon."

Deals will continue to be a big part of Groupon, Higginson said, but he hopes they can be blended with regular sales in a more sustainable way. "Daily deals have a big role in customer acquisition," he said, "even in offline commerce." Groupon's also betting on that business coming back in a big way, as people embrace their Hot Vax Summer and go back to doing fun things in the world. "But then once they become customers that first time," Higginson said, "let's make it easier for them to be repeat customers." Groupon has never been good at that, but that's a big part of the company's focus going forward.

This is about to be a seriously crowded space, though. Airbnb continues to bet on Experiences, which still serves a more vacation-focused need but could become a big platform for all things local business. Yelp, Facebook, Google and the other platforms that have invested in making local businesses easier to find online are all investigating ways for those businesses to sell things through their platforms. And during the pandemic, many businesses have been forced to adapt to online ways of doing business, meaning they may not need platforms and intermediaries at all.

Higginson said his case to merchants suddenly overwhelmed with online options is a simple one. "We have the reach and the scale, we have the tools," he said. But also: "It's not like you pay a subscription to get on." Groupon takes a cut when a business makes a sale, which he hopes aligns the two sides more than an ad-supported social network. Plus, Groupon's integrating with booking platforms, calendar systems and the like, in the hopes of making Groupon a no-brainer option even for companies who also sell elsewhere.

One challenge for Groupon will be training its users to think of it as more than the flash-deals site that made it a household name. That's why the launch is coming now, Higginson said. "We think that's part of the magic of this moment," he said. Redesigning the app catches users' attention, "and allows us to tell the story about what the new, evolved Groupon is going to look like." With millions of people reemerging from lockdown and newly free to do even simple things like get a haircut or go to the dentist, there's a brief window of opportunity to insert yourself into people's new routines before the new normal sets in stone. Groupon doesn't want to miss it.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep Reading Show less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more .

Keep Reading Show less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep Reading Show less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison ( @dgoodison ) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep Reading Show less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich ) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep Reading Show less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins