Problems abound for Groupon, the country’s largest daily deal site

rebeca  Thursday, February 17, 2011

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It seems that Groupon just can’t get much right these days. Let me give you a rundown of some of the company’s biggest flubs to date:

1. Super Bowl ads are deemed offensive when the company appeared to be poking fun at some significant world problems. “The people of Tibet are in trouble,” actor Timothy Hutton said with an air of concern. “But they still whip up an amazing fish curry!” You can watch it here, but just reading the text makes me wonder what they were thinking. If you read the product descriptions on their site, you can see they try to place humor in every-day life. This time the joke wasn’t so funny. Big fail, Groupon. The site later pulled the ad and issued an apology.

2. If you thought the Barnes and Noble Groupon was a hot deal, you weren’t alone. It seems so many people wanted to take advantage of the deal that Groupon’s primary site crashed. When consumers couldn’t access the site, they were directed, by Groupon, to a secondary site to make their purchase. There were a few problems with this. 1. People couldn’t access the Groupons they already had. So, if you were planning to print on of your Groupons for dinner that night, you were out of luck. 2. You couldn’t use any referral credits for this purchase. 3. Members are supposed to earn $10 in Groupon Bucks when they refer a friend. However, because customers were redirected to a different site, there was no way to track referrals. So, this blogger was shorted her due credit, as I’m sure many others were as well. Groupon said on their facebook wall that if you provided the email address of those you referred that they would issue the credit. But, as a blogger, that’s pretty difficult to do.

3. This past week, Groupon was exposed for offering a Groupon to FTD that really didn’t save anybody any money at all. When consumers got their voucher, they were directed to a specific FTD site that had inflated the prices, making it look as though the Groupon was saving them money. FTD and Groupon have argued the semantics of the deal, but decided to give users the sale price and the $20 discount. They also offered refunds.

4. Then again we saw what appeared to be a another bait and switch with a Groupon for BlueDolphin.com. For $10, consumers were offered a $20 Groupon to put toward magazine subscriptions. The description says “BlueDolphin.com offers more than 1,000 magazine titles spanning nearly every imaginable genre.” It wasn’t until after they purchased the Groupon that they learned they had to go through a specific website to redeem the offer. The Groupon deal page lists two different links and not until you get the voucher you are told to use this specific link, which has a more limited selection of titles to choose from. Many customers were upset when they realized they couldn’t purchase the magazine they wanted through this deal-specific site. You can see the deal in it’s entirety here.

This all sounds very troublesome to me. It’s a shame too, because they really do offer some great deals. While Groupon offers a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee, I still advise you to use caution when purchasing from them in the future. Read all the fine print and examine the links in the post even if they’re not clearly defined. Let’s hope they get the crap together and sort out all these problems. I want to be able to take advantage of the deals, but I certainly don’t want to feel like someone is pulling the wool over my eyes. What do you think?