Groupon . . . begins its business in Korea by founding a branch here and hiring 150 or so employees. The size is quite large and not eclipsed by the 200 or so staff of Ticket Monster, the Korean company dominating the local market. As such, a noticeable change is expected to follow in the segment that is poised to explode this year.
The branch is going to be run jointly by an executive from the headquarters and a Korean entrepreneur. Hwang Hee-seung and Yoon Shin-geun are strong candidates for the latter.
A blog post from last fall profiles the three largest social commerce sites in South Korea, though last month Ticket Monster, the biggest, bought out its closest competitor. Also from last month a JoongAng Daily article looking at complaints customers have made about local social commerce sites. Ticket Monster (티켓몬스터, and on Facebook) has group deals for Gwangju and the surrounding area, as well as for Seoul and the other large cities, in Korean. No word on whether the Korean Groupon will be easily usable by non-Koreans.
3 comments:
I use Groupon and a couple other such services in Toronto. The deals can be pretty amazing. The only catch is the voucher does not cover tax/tip. Your 50% off deal ends up being closer to 25% when you figure in tax & tip. That should not be a problem in Korea.
In only one instance I had a retailer refused to honor the deal on the voucher. It was place in Toronto called The Ballroom. They claimed the FabFind site should have printed "not valid on weekends" on their voucher. The Ballroom management was pretty adamant they weren't going to honor the deal nor even meet people half way. Sorry, take it up with FabFind. FabFind, in contrast, fully refunded the fee and gave each people in our party a $10 gift card! For their own part they claim the deal was correct and it's The Ballroom backing out on the deal.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone using Groupon et al have a problem with refunds. I think these companies need a very liberal refund policy as you're placing a great deal of trust and fronting cash for a service to be rendered possibly months away. If the word gets out Groupon screwed someone, you'll take a pass.
Anyway, I wonder how this will work in Korea:
Will merchants be like "okay a 50% discount sounded good at the time but we never thought people would use it... so we're not honoring it".
Will merchants train their staff to handle the vouchers? Will they inform them? Or will we see a bunch of befuddled front line staff running around trying to figure out what this paper is all about.
Will Groupon Korea have as liberal a refund policy?
Speical report for You!!!
Charts of Social Commerce in Korea for the 3rd week of March, 2011
http://sckorea.kr/3rd_Week_March_2011.pdf
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