Loy Okezie
These days, it seems that there are more ‘Daily Deal’ websites popping up than there are deals.
Groupon, the mother of all deal sites has seen tremendous success in the US, and is currently embarking on an aggressive global expansion.
Yesterday, Groupon announced the acquisition of three local daily deal sites, SoSasta in India, Grouper in Isreal and Twangoo in South Africa.
Thanks to Groupon’s recent $950 million funding. But no thanks to Google’s $6 billion acquisition bid of Groupon that was rejected.
Since Groupon has a lot of money to throw around; they offered $286 million to acquire a domain name (groupon.com.au) registered with their trademark by another company called Scoopon, we won’t be surprised to see domain-squatters grab groupon.com.ng
While all of these is happening, Groupon’s “collective buying” method has caught the attention of savvy business people in Nigeria.
Grop.ly, a Nigerian Groupon clone which launched in May 2010 has already provided over 250 deals from local businesses to customers.
Grop.ly is globally headquatered in Houston, USA with operations in West Africa and Lagos, Nigeria as its regional headquaters.
The site allows consumers 40% – 90% discounts from spas to salons, manicures to movies.
Grop.ly uses Cash Envoy, an online payments service and claims over N200,000 has been saved as a result of discounts found on its site.
Thoughts
Now that Groupon is seemingly domineering and determined to kill a good deal of its clones in various countries, it leaves one wondering if they’ll be interested in buying Grop.ly, their Nigerian clone.
While I’m not sure if Nigeria is a big enough market for group-buying services like this, I think it will come down to attracting a lot of people to buy the deals that they like with their friends.
Interestingly, Nigerians (especially Yorubas) love traditional group-buying. A good example is the ‘Aso-Ebi’ syndrome (pronounced ah-show-eh-bee), which literally means “clothes of friends” – a group-buying concept of wearing the same kind of clothing by friends and family to occasions such as weddings.
But only time will tell if the online group-buying method will work, especially as more and more businesses are willing to give discounts.
That could bring that critical mass of consumers needed to make the group-buying concept in Nigeria successful.
Only then would Groupon consider buying a local group-buying deals site in Nigeria.
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7 Responses to Will Groupon Buy Into Nigeria’s Group-buying Market?
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by techloy. techloy said: Will Groupon Buy Into Nigeria’s Group-buying Market?: These days, it seems that there are more ‘Daily Deal’ webs… http://bit.ly/igASce [...]
This is possible. I wrote about an experience in Harvard few weeks ago. It was in an Igbo market.
"The women formed themselves into a crowd and pooled their meager individual resources. They bought a large quantity and shared the inexpensive goods among themselves. It was a magical experience: a crowd of like-minded people, congregating to get a bargain, on the spot."
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/generating_busine...
Online group buying model would work fine in the African sub continent because most of the people in the developing and poor countries need these type of daily deals and discounts. Therefore, if Groupon purchases the Nigeria's group buying market, it would benefit both the business and consumer.
Loy,
It sure is happening. Another case in point. I use to work in an office, every friday (TGIF), the cleaners, security, and other staffs would pull money together and buy cartoons of turkey and share. Thus, saving money and getting quality.
A lady, Mrs Mustopha, would get 20 people together (private individuals and or food sellers) and share a full ‘malu’ (cow) among then, saving them money and giving them quality bone-less meat.
Finally, Avenues to wealth, an MLM marketing COY with over 25,000 members in Nigeria also offers same (group buying into deals) through the corporative set up and super discounts enjoyed by registered members.
MY THOUGHT
Its going to work, and watch out Nigerians would buy into it in droves since information sharing has been deregulated.
Nice piece and nice focus Loy, keep it coming.
[...] get funded. The Groupon phenomenon is in high gear and Loy speculates if Groupon will buy into Nigeria’s group buying market after it recently acquired Grouper in Isreal and Twangoo in South [...]
I will not typically post but I loved your blog page a great deal.
Awesome.