On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Don Kratzer wrote:
> Most coupons are just screen grabs, or even just e-mail messages that
> get shown. They tend not to be of high value more of the 10% off
> variety. I personally haven't seen coupons of high value but with
> redemption limitations such as unique codes etc.
Well, and with good reason. The last thing a restaurant owner wants is a
restaurant full of people with 50% off coupons while customers who would
pay full price line up outside.
The company I work for, Tabemo (http://www.tabemo.com), which does
on-line coupons for various restaurants, offers minimum discounts of
20%, and they range up to 50% off. (We once had a 70% off one, actually,
but that's once in a blue moon.) The reason the restaurants will do that
for us is that they can control the days and times they offer coupons,
and how many coupons they offer.
I don't know of anybody else doing this in the coupon biz, but I'm
not really familiar with competitors outside of the restaurant space.
However, a lot of our ostensible competitors have a rather different
business model, anyway. We charge the end user a small monthly fee (300
yen) for the ability to take coupons on our site; the others (Pia, Hot
Pepper, etc.) charge the restaurants for advertising, and try to attract
users looking as often for comprehensive restaurant information as they
are for discounts.
We don't do anything special to track coupon use at the moment. We've
thought about doing things like on-screen bar codes, but you'd need a
reader in the shop which is an expense and headache most restaurants
don't want. Possibly when Felica becomes much more widely deployed there
will emerge some sort of infrastructure for this sort of thing.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Wed Nov 9 09:51:42 2005