Why we don’t use Groupon to sell 3Fuel
There’s more than one way to get a discount on your 3Fuel. You can buy it at your local box, and save on shipping (if they carry it), you can place a bulk order (20+ units), or you can find one of our online affiliates and use their discount code (which entitles them to a commission AND gets you a discount). But one way you can’t get a discount on 3Fuel is with a Groupon. There’s a few good reasons for our decision not to use Groupons to sell our product…
The first is that we don’t want to have Groupon competing with our online affiliates. How would you feel if you were selling our product at 10% off, and all of a sudden Groupon was offering it to you at 20% off (or whatever)? Not cool. So that’s the first reason. We want to cut checks to our affiliates, not to Groupon.
The second reason, and this may interest you, especially if you own a small business (perhaps a Crossfit Box): Groupon campaigns lower the Yelp rating of small businesses! Apparently they don’t have other pressing concerns at Harvard, Boston University, and Yale, where this data originates. There are a lot of potential causes behind this correlation, according to Forbes, but in general, there’s a strong trend towards offering a product or service on Groupon and an increase in dissatisfied customers. Part of Forbes’ speculation is that the dissatisfaction comes from attracting customers based on a low price who may not be entirely interested in getting the best product in a specific niche. So besides not wanting dissatisfied customers, or shotgunning our product out to people who might not really be interested, we don’t want to compete with our valued online affiliates – we want them to earn money by giving you a discount.
So while Groupon might work for some kinds of businesses, we don’ feel ours (which caters to a highly specific crowd) is one of them.
[Interested in becoming an online affiliate and getting your box/gym a discount code? Drop us an email or hit us up on our Facebook page and we’ll tell you how]
