Groupon battles local sites

Groupon is threatening to sue websites that continue to publish Groupon’s daily offers.

By NOA PARAG
Group-purchases website Groupon Inc., which recently entered the Israeli market through the acquisition of Grouper Ltd. for $10 million, is going to war. Several Israeli group-purchases sites, which aggregate online deals, have received an official letter from Groupon demanding that they remove the deals from the general-list site, people familiar with the matter told Globes.
Groupon believes this aggregation hurts the company’s brand and the deals’ visibility, saying it was carried out without the approval or cooperation among the parties.
Groupon is threatening to sue websites that continue to publish Groupon’s daily offers, the sources said.
The various aggregation sites, Tavo, Cliqa, Daydeals and Zap, which also recently began to offer collated information about online deals, scour the Internet and collate all deals offered that day in a single email to users. In this way, Israeli users do not have to visit each site to find the best deal, and they are simultaneously exposed to the best discounts.
“Groupon’s concern about being presented on Zap solely harms the consumer who wants to compare scores of deals offered daily,” Zap CEO Eitan Zinger told Globes. Zap does not sell the daily transactions, but only mediates between the consumer and various sites without making a profit, as the service is gratis to both sides, he said.