Groupon can expect even more drama in the months ahead, when it’ll be featured prominently in a new comedy just picked up by CBS.
In an annual study tracking customer satisfaction ratings with the top 100 online retailers, perhaps the biggest takeaway is that Amazon is the world’s biggest e-retailer for a reason: It just plain makes customers happier than the competition.
Walmart became the world’s largest retailer by attracting consumers who were most interested in low prices, not a highfalutin, top-notch shopping experience. At least Walmart’s got the cheapest prices and packs in the most value, right? Well, no.
Imagine if you could pay for parking with a few taps of your phone, and that you’d never have to pay for more time than you used. Imagine if, after you’re done eating a bag of chips or drinking a carton of juice, you could scarf down the perfectly edible packaging, too. Engineers and designers have been imagining these things, and more.
Groupon’s “Reserve” daily deal program, which focuses on fancy tasting menus and other luxury offerings, is spreading to its fourth U.S. city, Los Angeles.
If done properly, a smartly built green home featuring solar power, energy-efficient appliances, and proper insulation can result in the owner facing monthly electricity bills amounting to $0, or thereabouts. Now, one homebuilder is making such “net-zero” features standard in several communities around the U.S.
By some account, there has been an especially sharp rise in online shopping during the first couple of months in 2012—a time period that just so happens to coincide with an unusual spike in gas prices.
The group that should probably be most excited by a new iPad hitting the marketplace is that of kids who will suddenly become the lucky owners of perfectly functional, hand-me-down iPads as their parents upgrade to the new tablets.
Out of the blue, the ubiquitous DVD- and video game-rental kiosk service Redbox has announced five days in a row of free video game rentals.
You can’t swing a mouse without hitting a daily deal from Groupon, LivingSocial, or one of hundreds of other sites. Millions of consumers see these deals every day, and they don’t pay a dime unless they decide to buy the offer. So why would anyone pay $30 a year for access to such deals?
There’s an argument to be made that niche deal sites, which target consumers in smaller demographics, have an advantage over the sites competing with Groupon for the broadest audience possible.
Duracell? Energizer? The cheapie packages of AAs at the dollar store? Tired of dumping money blindly on batteries for Wii remote controllers, flashlights, Nerf guns, and the like, a physicist decides it’s time to investigate which batteries truly give the most bang for the buck.
Without question, Groupon has been a tremendous business success story thus far, inspiring the legions on copycat daily deal sites, along with the previously unheard-of notion that coupons can, in fact, be cool. The latest major force to leap into the field dominated by Groupon and LivingSocial is PayPal, which is expected to start rolling out mobile daily deals in early 2012. Given the soaring popularity of daily deals over the past few years, though, the question worth asking might not be why PayPal’s entering the market, but what took it so long?
In a new survey, nearly half of consumers (48%) “feel high-tech manufacturers bring new products to market faster than people need them.”
There’s a long, storied history of retailers battling it out for holiday shopping dollars. Price wars, seasonal promotions aimed at one-upping the competition, and price-matching guarantees are all commonplace, and considered fair game. While almost anything goes in the competitive marketplace, Amazon’s bold recent move seemed over the top—perhaps even, as some described it, “evil.”
How’s this for a brazen move to steal business away from brick-and-mortar stores? Under normal circumstances, a shopper using Amazon’s Price Check app in a physical store can instantaneously check to see if Amazon sells the same merchandise for a better price. This Saturday, however, when a consumer uses the app, Amazon will undercut the price in the store by 5%.
While Cyber Monday is gone, the deals aren’t. Actually, in some ways, they’re better than ever: At least seven retailers are offering 40% nearly everything sold on their websites.
Prices of many tablets and e-readers have shrunk in recent months, and sales are expected to come with bonuses and/or further price deductions during the upcoming holiday shopping frenzy—on Black Friday especially. Here are a few of the gadgets that are intriguing, if only because they’re newly easier to afford.
The days of skirting around having to pay retail sales tax by shopping online may be coming to a close—and Amazon, of all companies, is supporting the effort.
