Groupon

An e-commerce business established in 2008, Groupon is an American business based in Chicago. Within less than 2 years, the company achieved a turnover of € 887 million. By 2015, Groupon operated in 500 cities and had 48.1 million customers.

As a major e-commerce platform, Groupon enables companies to sell a wide range of commodities which include food, beverages, pet supplies, personal care, clothing, accessories. Businesses can also offer other services such as travel, holidays and tours, beauty & spa services and is also known for its special deals of the day. There’s also a mobile application which allows customers to shop directly from their phone.

Groupon achieved a turnover of € 2.30 billion in 2018 and employed 6576 persons.

Expansion has been on the agenda of Groupon which acquired other e-commerce platforms such as MyCityDeal and Darbeerry.ru. These e-commerce companies were rebranded under Groupon’s name.

However, the expansion of Groupon is not limited to e-commerce businesses. Instead, other businesses in different sectors are now part of the portfolio. These include the social shopping service, Mertado and the mobile technology business, Mob.ly.

During 2012, Groupon also bought Breadcrumbs, a point of sales system for restaurants and Breadcrumb PRO and Breadcrumb POS which concerned other sectors.

A year later, Groupon took over Boomerang, a company that allowed customers to share gift cards and other deals. This subsidiary developed Groupon Coupons which is very popular with Groupon’s customers.

Groupon also acquired various other companies which include:

Glassmap, a location sharing application
Blink, a travel application for last minute bookings
Swarm Mobile, an analytics and marketing company
Bristol, a cloud-storage company
Ticket Monster, a korean e-commerce company
Ideili, a fashion company

Universal Orlando Theme Parks partnered with Groupon.

In 2015, Groupon bought Order Up, a food delivery service which was later rebranded as Groupon To Go and in 2018, the e-commerce business acquired Bristol, a Cloud company for € 57 million.