Blog – Altima Interactive Australia
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The service called “PayPal Here” and according information available at PayPal website will allow to accept credit card payments in any place with mobile network coverage. Merchants need to have only smartphone with special app and (optionally?) a card reader that Paypal announced to distribute free of charge.
With 2.4% commission this products looks to compete with hot start-up Square that provides very similar solution. Square’s commission is stated as 2.75%
The battle between Scoopon and Groupon over groupon.com.au domain and related trademark seems to be over. It’s reported in SMH that the parties reached settlement and US group buying giant got domain and TM for undisclosed compensation.
Industry experts believe that that the deal value is at least not less than $289K (the sum, which Scoopon founders brothers Hezi and Gabby Liebovich asked).
Despite of the deal groupon.com.au domain still leads nowhere at this moment. It’s be interesting to see how fast Groupon will change branding of it’s Aussie venture currently called StarDeals to Groupon.
Author of one of most popular web servers for high load websites, nginx, Igor Sysoev wrote yesterday at his website that he is creating a company to foster nginx development.
According last Netcraft survey nginx is used for over 7% of million busiest sites
Up to date Igor Sysoev has been working in big Russian Internet company Rambler.Ru and nginx was developed as an open-source project while used for Rambler as well.
It’s promised in Ihor’s post that new company will keep nginx open-source.
For now it is unclear will Sysoev combine this new business with employment in Rambler and what will be a revenue model for new company.
Recent research conducted by Professor Utpal M. Dholakia from Rice University contains facts that are not very pleasant form currently booming group buying industry:
So the conclusion that the researchers made is not very positive for group buying industry especially for websites that provide deals: the little loyalty, low rate of interest to repeat purchase from merchants and increasing competition will lead to the erosion of the current healthy margin and make the life of group deals providers harder.
The research collected data from 324 US businesses operating in 23 markets that used group buying promotion in 2009-2011.
Continue reading “Group buying industry future looks not so cloudless”
According to official press-release published today at eBay web site, auction giant acquired rest of share in Magento Inc, the creator of Magento e-commerce – one of the most popular open source e-commerce platforms. Last year eBay already bought 49% stake in Magento and today announced the full ownership purchase.
According press-release, Magento will be used to build new product from eBay, X-commerce:
X.Commerce, eBay’s newly created integrated open commerce platform group, is focused on leveraging the company’s assets and partner technologies to build a strong, robust developer community as a resource for merchants and retailers of all sizes
It’s interesting to track how the situation will develop and what happen with Magento open-source solution. It would be pity if eBay decides to shut it down.
As Techcrunch reported US group buying industry leader Groupon filed SEC registration statement (S-1 form). Groupon plans to attract $750M of capital . Unfortunately from the article and SEC filing it is not clear what number of shares and the percentage of ownership will be offered, but rumored valuation (according SmartCompany and Wall Street Journal) is around $20-25 billion.
There are some interesting financial data about the company performance till 1st quarter (ended March 31) of 2011. I put the most important numbers in the table below (all numbers are in thousands):
As ITwire reported, Groupon Australia (trades as StarDeals.com.au) declared last week that just in few months after launch Stardeals.com.au web site managed to acquire more web traffic than any competing web sites (biggest competitors are reportedly Scoopon, Spreets, Cudo, JumpOnIt/LivingSocial). Representative of US based pioneer of group purchases industry refers to Hitwise traffic statistic.
However competitors, namely Cudo, doubt that this statistic reflects the reality and Hitwise data has several major flaws: limited coverage (no Telstra and Optus for example), traffic is measured at providers (not users) so it is easier to use bots and tricky ads to inflate the statistic.
In my personal opinion these doubts look reasonable.
SmartCompany reported today that Catch of the Day (a venture of Leibovich brothers which Scoopon is a part of) received $80 million investment from James Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings, Seek co-founder Andrew Bassat and American hedge fund Tiger Global. The Catch of the Day founders will keep controlling stake, but Tiger’s Lee Fixel and Seek’s Jason Lenga will join the board.
Scoopon is the last from three leading group buying web sites in Australia that was acquired or got external funding. Two others are Spreets (now part of Yahoo!7 and JumpOnIt – was purchased by LivingSocial).
Next interesting deal on Aussie group buying market, after Yahoo!7 bought Spreets last year and JumpOnIt was sold to LivingSocial, last week the world-wide market leader and pioneer, US based Groupon purchased Melbourne group purchase web site CrowdMass.
If you visit Crowdmass web site you will see the message:
Crowdmass has joined the team at Stardeals by Groupon Australia (part of the fastest growing company in history).
Reportedly, as I understood from the record in the blog of the guy who knows them, Crowdmass founders – David Wei, Ying Wang and Tim Wu remain in the Groupon/Stardeals team.
According to US daily deals aggregation service Yopit Groupon’s revenue decreased 30% in February 2010.
Is such decline a sign of the fade of the daily deals market in general or Groupon’s particular problem? The company has changed it’s business model significantly from single “the best deal in the city”, that worked extremely well and helped Groupon to become multi-million business in very short term. Now there are such stuff as geo-targeted deals, merchant’s stores.
Maybe this is not what Groupon costomers are looking for and this new business model conflicts with Groupon’s brand promise?
Interesting that according Yopit, LivingSocial – second business group buying web site revenue has been growing in “59% in March and is now generating as much revenue as Groupon in major markets”.
