Is Groupon As Valuable to Wall Street as it is to Main Street?

According to Groupon's site, they have over 34.25 Million subscribers with over 37 Million Groupons sold, saving over 1.5 Trillion dollars in over 160 cities across the US and Canada. Now those are some impressive numbers!

Unsurprisingly, cash-heavy Google was ready to buy into (or buy out) Groupon back in December of 2010 at an estimated 6 Billion dollars with estimate market valuation of 2 Billion dollars. Unfortunately for the folks at Google, Groupon's management had other plans in mind.

Now, I don't intend to sit here chip in my two cents regarding whether Groupon should've sold itself to Google or whether their 25 Billion dollar IPO is overpriced. What I can, and will say however, is that Groupon has its business strategy down!

I've purchased at least six different deals from both Groupon and LivingSocial and can honestly say that if it were not for the daily collective coupon emails with ACTUAL deals, I would've blown both outfits off from the first day. To my delight, however, that has not been the case!

Social media is here to stay, Groupon and LivingSocial have merely developed a business strategy that harnesses the unlimited possibilities that uniting the planet via the internet has to offer. This my friends is what a company's IPO is measured against! Equity growth potential, subscriber growth, 97% return rate for merchants, measured and proven market retention for listing retailers, even AFTER the collective coupons are no longer available.

IPO or no IPO, Americans will continue to consume, so you may as well beat everyone else to our attention!


Cheers,



Sources


TechCrunch LivingSocial
TechCrunch Groupon
Groupon
Inc.com