VietNamNet Bridge – Experts have anticipated that a lot of websites selling goods under the model of groupon shopping would have to shut down in 2012, after they made a lot of mistakes in doing business.

The market still attractive?

Truong To Linh, Business Director of Hotdeal.vn, has affirmed that the groupon shopping market still shows great potentials and it has not got saturated as people think.

Ho Quang Khanh, General Director of Cungmua.com, said that the shopping model has a lot of advantages, while the market is still very attractive. The specific characteristic of e-commerce is to distribute goods directly to consumers, skipping a lot of intermediate merchants. Therefore, customers can be sure that they can buy goods at the best prices.

However, Linh of Hotdeal said that the key problem now is the overly stiff competition among service providers. Meanwhile, the service quality much depends on merchants.

“If the partners do not intend to keep long term cooperation, and if they offer low quality deals, which dissatisfy customers, it will cost a lot of money and efforts to fix the problems,” she said.

Meanwhile, in many cases, service providers are not at fault, while it is the buyers who take responsibility for the dissatisfaction because they do not read the deals’ terms carefully. It would be better if consumers, when receiving bad quality services, complain about this to the service providers directly, so that the providers can better their services. This is also the cooperation mechanism Hotdeal is following when doing business with goods and service merchants.

Meanwhile, a representative of a groupon website revealed that some goods merchants signed contracts with many groupon websites and run a lot of programs within just several days or weeks. As a result, merchants do not have enough goods to deliver to customers, while officers are not well trained enough to settle the problem. Therefore, customers feel as if they are not respected or cheated.

In order to survive, it’s necessary to upgrade services

Linh said that in 2012, Hotdeal.vn would make heavy investment on the information technology infrastructure, strengthen the order form management and offer different online payment methods.

Khanh has said that Cungmua.com has begun providing the service of delivering goods directly to customers, thus helping customers save time. In the past, after choosing products on the websites, consumers had to wait some time to get voucher and then bring the vouchers to the manufacturers to get products. Nowadays, the goods would be delivered directly to customers.

Khanh has revealed that Cungmua.com is considering some new ways that his rivals are following, including online supermarkets or tourism. Cungmua.com now runs a program on giving inCard, a membership card for loyal customers. The customers would be able to use the services available on Cungmua.com immediately without having to make payment in advance or wait for vouchers. When consuming goods and services, customers would enjoy the 50 percent price discounts, while the other 50 percent would be paid to the service provider in cash.

Deal trading floor – a new groupon model?

In January 2012, PeaceSort launched a groupon trading floor 1Top.vn, an electronic trade floor which allows goods and service suppliers lease the booths on the websites, design deals to sell to customers themselves.

Dao Thuc Van, Marketing Director of PeaceSoft, said that when buying goods and services from 1Top.vn, consumers would get back money if the service providers do not fulfill the commitments announced in the deals. Besides, if customers buy deals already and still do not use the deals for one month, they could sell the deals to the website at the prices equal to 70 percent of the initial prices.

Experts believe that the groupon shopping market would not see the boom of new websites in the time to come, because investors have drawn the lessons from their colleagues. However, new websites would still appear when the websites’ owners can find suitable ways for themselves.

Source: TBKTSG