Using Groupon as a merchant can be tumultuous. I never had to come up with more policies than when I was a merchant on Groupon. The policies weren't necessarily to clarify things. It was specifically to prevent drama from The Lunatic clients. Not to mention the fact that Groupon takes 50% of your income. So they already force you to mark your prices down.
Then they periodically have these random advertising campaigns will they take even more off of your price. Sometimes the prices got down to 40% of the ticket price. So these clients were coming and were sometimes using more shampoo than clients paying full price. I'd get these people that had hair hanging halfway down their back.
I forgot to mention that once a ticket price is lowered, you have to pay 50% to Groupon. There were countless occasions where Groupon "forgot" to pay me. I had to constantly be on the phone with customer service demanding my money.
I spoke about this in depth on a podcast episode. Once I stopped accepting Groupon I realized I didn't go through any of these problems with clients who came in paying full price.
Now I'm not saying all Groupon clients are like this. About 5% of the clients I got from Groupon actually came back and were decent people. 1 to 2% of those actually stayed as faithful clients. When you are a small business owner you do not have time to dedicate to anger let alone rage. These people brought about so many issues that I had to restrict them the only coming once weekly if they were using the Groupon. This strategy was actually working successfully. I didn't have the crazy clients clogging up my books on busy days like Saturdays.
Eventually the Groupon clients started getting upset and started complaining to Groupon that I wasn't available. They paused all of my campaigns saying I wasn't readily available enough or I was getting too many complaints about not being available. That was one of the best decisions that was made for me that I didn't have to think about. Those clients added an enormous amount of stress.
My advice for small business owners? Dedicate your time to getting high paying clients. They come ready to spend money and they tip much better. Also these full price paying clients are more than likely to send you other clients who are ready to pay full price. That is was going to keep your business driving.
