We were invited to draw a portrait of group buying and flash sales during a conference given as part of Infopresse's RDV_Web on April 14, 2011 . And as always, we wanted to push the exercise further by producing our own study on the state of this phenomenon in Quebec and more particularly in the Montreal region. To do this, we collected all the deals offered by Groupon , Tuango , PromoduJour / DealOfTheDay and Living Social over a period of 3 months, from December 15, 2010 to March 14, 2011 and we obtained quite interesting results.
We contacted the 4 sites in the sample to obtain the size of their database:
First highlight, Groupon, the leader in the USA, is outdone by a Quebec company. We couldn't get Living Social's follower count; competitive reasons imposed silence on them during our study.
Here are the results of our study.
On average, 313 coupons are sold per site daily over the study period. Tuango takes first place with an average of 534 coupons sold.
On average, an offer from a restaurant sells 486 coupons.
On average, an offer from a hosting center sells 30 coupons.
It should be understood that the cost of acquiring an offer from a accommodation center is higher ($91) than an offer from a restaurant ($17), this could impact the volume of coupons purchased by a subscriber.
The average variation in the number of coupons sold is less than 100 between the smallest percentage off and the largest percentage off.
The average variation in the number of coupons sold is less than 100 between the smallest amount payable and the largest amount payable.
On average, the sites sold 463 coupons during the day on Friday and 177 on Saturday. It can be seen that people buy in order to plan an activity during the weekend.
In conclusion, we find that the nature of the offer and the promotion day are the factors that most influence the purchase of coupons.