Groupon is like submitting to the hun circa 1998/99. If you knew what you were doing, if you understood the traffic and knew how to market to and convert the traffic, then you were golden. If not, you were just another part time, broke dipshit that got a gallery listed and woke up to a $4000.00 bandwidth bill and zero sales. That pretty much describes the vast majority of Groupon merchants.
My partner and I in a mainstream business played with Groupon, living social et al, played with different deal types/structures/wording etc and found what worked well for us in terms of getting people in the door and turning them into long term, paying customers. Then... we just made that our business model and do not use Groupon or similar sites anymore and continue to be overwhelmed with the response without Groupon.
