Below is a guest post by Sanne Meussen, who studied consumer responses to daily deal websites in her master's thesis (which I supervised). Apart from the to-be-expected preference for higher discounts on such websites, she also found some evidence that there is a hidden danger to these high discounts...
Even though Groupon has lost $10
billion of its market value in less than one year, the number of subscribers is
still growing. Apparently, consumers are still interested in high discount deals
on daily deal websites. Why wouldn’t they, if they can eat a first-class meal
at a local restaurant with a 75% discount? Groupon even points out: ‘we want
each Groupon purchase to feel too good to be true’.
