Posted on

Groupon claims to secure the biggest share in group buying web traffic

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.

Posted on

Typical group buying web site user: 45-60 yo woman

According statistic from online research company ViziSense cited in recent “The Australian Financial Review” article 60% of group buying web site users are women, most of users are aged 45 to 60.

Scoopon users tend to be younger, 36-44.

ViziSense analyzed audience of Spreets, Cudo, Scoopon, JumpOnIt, Spreets and OurDeal.

Posted on

Telsyte estimates group buying market in Australia $63M in 2010 and projects $242M in 2011

Group buying industry is booming in Australia according recent research of Telsyte (business unit of Gibson Quai-AAS Consulting) and the market will grow 284% this year.
The research covers over 20 group buying web sites that offer heavily discounted group deals for Australians. Over 79% of the market share reported to be taken by four leading players (Spreets, Scoopon, Jump On It, and Cudo).
This figures correspond quite well with the study that we did last fall.
Telsyte makes some interesting forecasts about future industry trends, namely (my comments are in the brackets):

• Arrival of large online multi-nationals such as Google, Facebook and Groupon into the local group buying market (actually GroupOn is already here).
• Agencies representing merchants in deal negations and analytics.
• Proliferation of mobile group buying applications (at least Scoopon and one new smaller – CrowdSauce already have iPhone apps).
• Local media publishers entering the group buying industry through white-label software platforms, acquisitions, or distribution partnerships (we also already see it, with Telstra/Sensis that launched YellowPage Offers).

Some more details about research avalable at Telsyte web site

Posted on

Cudo accuses Buyii in copyright infringement

Group buying industry in Australia becomes more and more interesting. In addition to the legal fight between GroupOn and Scoopon we may see one more battle.
One of group buying web site, Cudo.com.au sent “cease and desists” letter to Buyii.com.au, a web site that aggregates daily deals from several sources. Cudo requested Buyii to stop use of it’s content including logo, photos, texts. Cudo management consider that such use violates their copywrite and that Buyii compete with Cudo in term of search engine optimization. According Cudo CEO, Billy Tucker, when users search for the word “Cudo”, Buyii shows up in the first few results with the description, “Cudo’s daily deals plus more deals from other daily deal sites on one page”. I have checked it, today in Google Australia Buyii appears 5th in organic search results. Quite an interesting story, now I start to care about getting a letter from GroupOn, because this blog appears 1st if you search for StarDeals 🙂

However, Buyii founder refuses to comply with Cudo’s demands and plan to show Cudo’s deals in the future, while did some changes in the site design (like removed Cudo’s logo from their home page).

Would be interesting to see how the conflict develops.

More details can be found in SmartCompany’s article

Posted on

Smart Company about Group Buying

I admit that noticed this interesting article a bit late (it is dated end of November), but later is better than never. So, Patrick Stafford from SmartCompany wrote a good, comprehencive review of group buying industry in Australia.
It’s a pretty long article that gives ABC of the group buying model and reviews the state of market in Australia, so I would recommend everybody interested in the industry to check it. Especially agreeable, that Patric cited our research (while unfortunately forget to put a link to it).
Some most interesting quotes from the article:

  • Spreets, JumpOnIt and Scoopon are biggest players (opinion match our research);
  • Cudo is expected to die soon;
  • Groupon will come to Australia soon;