According to Yipit, Yelp is testing Groupon-style daily deals. Here’s the relevant discussion that seems to reveal it:
I’ve repeatedly talked to Yelp about couponing (and mobile). The thrust of Yelp’s statements to me is basically: they’ve had thousands of offers created by SMBs but there’s limited sophistication there about how to most effectively use promotions. Yelp hasn’t tied check-ins and coupons together either at this point — something the company should do.
However a daily deal would be a potentially effective offering for Yelp’s very large consumer audience and maybe the advertising vehicle the site has been looking for. A 200+ strong sales force could effectively sell group buying.
Groupon, LivingSocial and scores of others have now largely educated the market, paving the way for Yelp to promote group buying in major cities without much explanation of how it works. They could even take lower margins than Groupon et al to attract SMBs.
Yipit offers some helpful best practices advice for Yelp as well:
- Only Business With at Least Four Stars.
- Exclusive Discounts. The deals should be available to all visitors but Yelp community members and elite yelpers should get a slightly better discount.
- Email Distribution. Email is key in the space and for Yelp to sell enough deals, they are going to have aggressively push email alerts.
- Manage redemption from the Yelp mobile app.
July 27th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
[...] This story was picked up by TechCrunch, The Next Web, Screenwerk, and Mashable, was syndicated in Business Insider, and made it to the homepage of [...]
August 26th, 2010 at 6:38 pm
[...] after the initial report appeared on Yelp testing deals, the company started getting in-bound calls from local merchants [...]