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GroupOn came to Australia as StarDeals.Com.Au?

Due to my interest to group buying industry, I try to watch regularly new sites that appearing in this arena in Australia. Today I made a search in Google and noticed new web site (in one of the Adwords), StarDeals.com.au

To my big surprise, when I opened it I see the next picture:

GroupOn Australia Stardeals.com.au

So finally it has happened, GroupOn came to Australia. All tells that the site was just launched:

  • current deal as well as  two closed deals so far and both looks like samples rather than real (same picture and dummy text, GroupOn Chicago address);
  • today sample deal is marked as ‘sold out’ in the middle of the day and with just 20 coupon purchased;
  • only Sydney is covered;
  • contact emaisl weren’t set up (I tried to write them but get bounces);
  • non-working links to Twitter, RSS and Facebook page (at the bottom)

Interesting to note that domain stardeals.com.au is registered by Groupon Europe GmbH.

We’ll see how it will develop, but if this is real attempt to launch in Australia, not a kind of exercise, it looks rather strange: why advertise in Google obviously ‘under constraction’ kind of site. Probably the reason is to start collecting subscribers database, but it can be done in a simpler way, with kind of “coming soon, leave your email’ temporary web page rather then unfinished piece of work with broken links.

Updates:

  • BTW, registration is working, I have got a confirmation by email from … GroupOn Singapore;
  • if you click to Adword (it is still active, use ‘deals melbourne’ as keywords to see it) in fact you will see a page looks more similar to pre-launch one (with email deals subscription), but after you enter an email you see the site as I described
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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;
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Google reportedly bought Group On

As SmartCompany wrote today, there are strong rumors that Google purchased GroupOn for 2.5 billion USD. The deal supposedly was closed earlier this month. Interesting to note, that earlier GroupOn reportedly rejected on offer from Yahoo! (US$1.7 billion).

GroupOn is a pioneer of group buyng, with over 20 million customers in 29 countries.

As I wrote earlier, there are many GroupOn followers in Australia, biggest five were analyzed in our report

Update: new rumors circulating indicate that GroupOn’s purchase price will be even higher, $US6 billion! If it is true it will be the biggers Google purchase!

Update2: GroupOn board decided to decline deal with Google. Things are getting even more interesting, some people start to believe that it is the milestone, marking the end of the Google Era in Internet.

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Australian group buying web sites comparative analysis report is published

The research announced in our previous post is ready! You will find the way to download the full report (17 pages PDF file) at the end of the post.

Key findings (extracts from the report)

The chart below shows the volume of the deals that 5 group buying web sites reported for the period of the research (01 Sep to 25 Oct 2010):

Group Buying Web sites in Australia, deals volume Septembe - October 2010
Continue reading “Australian group buying web sites comparative analysis report is published”

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Who is the biggest player on the hot group buying market in Australia? Comparative research.

After the phenomenal success of GroupOn, new group buying (group purchasing) web sites had started to appear virtually every day. It is extremely hot trend and even in Australia we have many of them. One day I asked myself, who is the leader of this market? Who close deals more often, attract more consumers and get highest volume of the transaction? So when I got some spare time, I conducted a small research to answer this questions and find out more insights.

Continue reading “Who is the biggest player on the hot group buying market in Australia? Comparative research.”