Groupon

Groupon is a deal-of-day website that features discounted gift certificates to its customers redeemable at local or national retailers. For retailers who are associated with Groupon, It offers several advantages through free advertising and marketing. For one thing, it's always beneficial for companies to feature their business free on the Groupon web site. With traditional advertising and e-mail marketing, retailers pay lots of money up front with no guarantee that the message will reach the consumers and translate into sales. But, with tens of thousands of subscribers in most cities, Groupon offers free access to the inboxes of target customers. Another perk of working with Groupon is that the website shares customer information with its merchants. According to the Groupon privacy statement, it shares e-mail addresses of customers who buy a Groupon with the business that's supplying the product or service.

Groupon's growth - revenue, subscribers and merchants - rests on whale of an information technology. In few years, it has grown from a company that could be run on a simple spreadsheet to one that needs systems spread across the globe. As the subscriber base and the amount of information shared on Groupon websites and applications continue to grow, company needs an increasing amount of network capacity and computing power. Groupon has built systems for merchants to track deal performance and analytics for demographic data and capacity. Groupon has also been spending to prevent counterfeit coupons by issuing the redeemable coupons with unique identifiers. Also, Groupon could use data analytics and business intelligence to collect and analyze the customer data. They also can use the predictive analysis techniques and tool on these data to determine the buying trend and give appropriate discounts to customers.

I strongly believe that Groupon has no sustainable competitive advantage over its business rivals without proper infrastructure. Groupon does not