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Scoopon reached settlement with Groupon regarding domain and trademark

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.

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Groupon goes to IPO

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):

Continue reading “Groupon goes to IPO”

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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.

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Scoopon got massive investments

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).

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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.

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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

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Why GroupOn came to Australia as StarDeals

As we wrote before, GroupOn came to Australia as StarDeals.Com.Au. Yesterday Andrew Mason, the founder and CEO of GroupOn wrote about it in GroupOn blog He wrote that sorry for delay (to enter Australia) and blames ScoopOn  in making life difficult for GroupOn:

“Scoopon went a little further than just starting their Groupon clone – they actually purchased the Groupon.com.au domain name, took the company name Groupon Pty Limited, and tried to register the Groupon trademark (filing for the trademark just seven days before us) in Australia.”

Mason mentioned that they offered $286K to ScoopOn for domain name and trademark and initially Scoopon owners had agreed, but later changed their mind. So now, according to GroupOn CEO, they have no other choice than suit ScoopOn in court. The case will be heard Feb 05 in state of Illinois court according SmartCompany. Scoopon chief executive Gabby Leibovich is confident in his company position, he said to SmartCompany:

“Groupon’s attempt to try and have this matter ‘determined’ in the court of public opinion is unfortunate and possibly amounts to sub-judice. As the matters in dispute are presently before the court, it is inappropriate to publicly comment on matters before the court.”

We’ll follow-up the process

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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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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.”