These different discounts

Hello, dear Habra community!

From the very beginning of our startup, we thought that it was time to start a corporate blog on Habré. As longtime Habra readers who have gathered a lot of useful information on your favorite portal, we will now gladly share it with others.

You may want to start a blog for a long time, especially when your project is developing rapidly, there are always not enough people in it, and thoughts about the blog are postponed until better times, but a few days ago one fine providence under the nickname Alizee made us hurry.

This nice girl published her post-investigation “How it actually works ...” and left us no chance for further inactivity. The fact is that the group shopping service analyzed by Alizee is our direct competitor. But in no case will we water them with mud or, conversely, pour traffic on their mill. We just want to tell a little to Habr's readers where this idea came from, and how similar services work in developed countries. By the way, they are very popular there, and practically all modern Internet projects are ahead of the dynamics of growth in the number of users.
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So, our project “Gorod24” www.gorod24.com.ua , and the original American equivalent of www.groupon.com , and many similar sites around the world, say, German www.citydeal.de (recently, by the way, bought Groupon-ohm or Japanese www.piku.jp is a group online discount service. From the point of view of the business model, everything is simple: the companies participating in the project offer large discounts on their services or products, and in return receive new customers, and most importantly, a wide coverage of the Internet audience (read: the most active customers) in a short time, as well as loud resonance in online media and communities.

All over the world, the scheme works as follows: the user pays for the service or goods at a discount, then he receives a coupon (or a certificate on our site, because, due to native Ukrainian specifics, we don’t like the word coupon) and pay them at the establishment. Thus, this service is absolutely free for the user. Moreover, the sites are closely monitoring that the offer is fair and, if possible, unique to their visitors (without additional fees, hidden fees, and the like).

Unfortunately, in Russia and later in Ukraine, some guys decided to change the scheme and began to offer a non-service or product at a discount, and often sell the right for a discount, i.e., a coupon that gives you the right to receive a discount, but does not pay for the service itself or product. Thus, the service of providing discounts for you becomes paid, and in the institution you have to pay again on the bill.

Moreover, as follows from the investigation of Alizee , one of the Ukrainian services offered to “buy a discount” on a publicly available share, as well as a discount on goods with hidden payments, but this is already on their conscience. Hopefully this is just a misunderstanding. We also regret that such a promising service is discredited from the very beginning. And we sincerely hope that one negative example will not become an obstacle for many of you to try such services and take advantage of their really profitable and interesting offers. For our part, we will do our best to gain your confidence.