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