A few selections from Groupon’s Q2 2015 earnings call*:
Our mission is to connect local commerce by providing better yield management tools to merchants looking to fill their open capacity, while offering consumers a seamless experience, through which they can discover, book, and buy locally. In order for our marketplace to thrive, we need more inventory. Just search for almost any category in almost any city, and you will notice that we just don’t have enough inventory to fulfill many of our customers’ demands. The math is pretty simple. If you take North America, we offer about 240,000 deals out of a pool of over four million merchants that we’ve targeted. With less than 10% of merchants running deals in our platform, we still have a long way to go to get density up to the appropriate levels, but we’ve made some progress.
Globally, we now have almost 510,000 active deals on the platform, including about 75,000 coupons. We’re on track to achieve our goal of more than doubling the number of active deals in our site over the next year. This should give us enough inventory in many, but not all, markets to improve conversion, allowing us to efficiently invest to drive customers to our site and drive local growth. As we expand our inventory, our goal is to attract merchants that don’t want to discount their products and services so heavily, but still want to access our large community. Merchant pages, and the various market rate transactional products that we now offer, allow merchants to sell their services at much closer to full price. To date, we’ve released almost two million merchant pages to be indexed on Google, up from roughly 900,000 last quarter.
The second broad category we’re focused on is ensuring that our customers have an amazing experience every time they use Groupon, from search, to buy, to book, to redeem, to pay. Our customers should be able to navigate local merchants, find amazing deals, hit buy, book an appointment or reserve a table, walk in and redeem their Groupon, pay the bill, and handle any customer service issues they have, seamlessly, right from their phone using the Groupon app. The process of using Groupon needs to be easier than not using Groupon.
Finally, over the past few years, we’ve invested significant time and money in connecting merchants to our marketplace. With our merchant app at the center, we built a suite of tools that connects nearly 1 million merchant to the more than 110 million people that have downloaded our app. Our goal is simple: to make it incredibly easy for merchants to upload inventory to our site, using our tools, so they can seamlessly access our marketplace.
*This excerpt contains forward looking statements. Groupon’s earnings materials, including a message on the use of forward looking statements, are available at www.groupon.com under the heading “Investor Relations.”