Groupon is going realtime in a big way, Andrew Mason, the local e-commerce site’s founder and chief executive, told the e-G8 conference, an exclusive gathering of tech giants and policymakers in Paris.
In two short years, Groupon has become the world’s largest daily deals service, but Mr Mason reckons there is still a long way to go for e-commerce, with only 5 per cent of transactions happening online and 80 per cent of people’s disposable income being spent within two miles of their house.
The company recently launched Groupon Now in its native Chicago, a new service that offers hyper-local deals at exactly the time you need them, largely through smartphone applications.
Mr Mason seems to see Groupon Now as a crucial second act for a company which turned down a $6bn acquisition offer from Google a few months ago.
“We are now moving to a model that is not just these daily offers that we are pushing to people,” he said, with a “realtime” system based on “serendipitous discovery” which is better for both consumers and vendors.
The rumoured partnership with location service Foursquare – which would be a hugely logical step for both companies – was not mentioned, but Mr Mason is clearly taking the move into mobile deals seriously.
“The daily deal thing was kind of easy compared to what we are trying to do now, which is the hard stuff – what Facebook and Wikipedia have already pulled off, which is finding a way to intercept people’s intent or people’s impulses.”
Both those companies were represented alongside Mr Mason on stage – one of whom, of course, is a new competitor to Groupon.
Asked about Facebook Deals, Mr Mason imaginatively dodged the question: “We are happy for consumers and merchants that competition exists. Facebook is a wildly innovative company. If they end up doing some cool stuff that completely demolishes Groupon, it’s probably for the better of society.”
More wit and wisdom – and, we hope, some answers about those Groupon IPO rumours – when Mr Mason appears again onstage later in a “fireside chat” at the end of the e-G8‘s first day.
UPDATE:
Mr Mason’s later conversation charted Groupon’s pivot from being “The Point”, a platform designed to rally people around good causes, and his focus on making customers happy.
For the first two years, investors and others peppered Groupon with questions about what made it different from its many competitors. “It freaks me out, I don’t know,” he said. “I would run around and say, what can i build that creates barriers to entry.”
But then one day, he looked around at its “2,000” competitors and Groupon’s continuing lead in the deals market, and concluded: “Either we have those barriers to entry or they don’t matter.”
Mr Mason did not comment on the rumours of a Foursquare partnership. Asked whether it would make more sense if the two companies merged, as many have suggested in the past, he said: “I can’t comment on people’s crazy speculation. What do you think I should do?”
He also said that the company had “not made any decisions” about an initial public offering. Asked if LinkedIn’s eye-popping debut had changed his thinking, he said: “No, not at all.”
