Coming in April, Groupon will be launching a new game-changer: Groupon Now, a mobile app that will allow you to find nearby deals under two categories, "I'm hungry" or "I'm bored."
With this app, users will be able to find deals by the hour.
It's like near field communications (which uses proximity sensors to get more specific with location), but for daily deals! Merchants will be able to specify exact time frames for their deals so that, for instance, restaurants that normally don't get customers between 2 pm and 5 pm can specify that window of time for their deals to get more traffic. But what they're really bound to love about it is the fact that they'll have more control over the onslaught of Groupon users they're bound to encounter. One of the complaints merchants typically have about Groupon is the fact that they might run a deal for a day, but if the expiration date is four months off, they're going to face unperdictable swarms of Groupon subscribers leaving bad tips around the clock for months.
With the new Groupon Now app, merchants can designate exact windows of time for when they're open to Groupon customers.
And then of course there are the subscribers, themselves. Think about the millions of times you've left your home without a plan for lunch--maybe you go on a day trip to visit your sister who lives three hours away. You get there, you're hungry, you want to go out, but you don't want to spend a lot of cash. Now you can have nearby Groupon deals ready for on-the-spot use at all times.
This new App means that after inventing the social commerce space, which has since been flooded with Groupon copycats, Groupon Now will finally launch it out of the water to set the company apart from the clones. Of course, one could argue that other daily deal sites can just create real-time apps of their own, but the service is so time-specific that Groupon's Andrew Mason believes that merchants will only be able to use one or two services, max.
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