Google Offers

» see google.com/offers as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In December 2010 Google offered around six billion dollars for Groupon and Groupon said no. That refusal is the entire origin of this product. Within weeks a Google spokesman was talking about enlisting small businesses in a test of a prepaid vouchers program, which is corporate language for we are going to build it ourselves and we are annoyed about it.

Google Offers launched on 26 May 2011 and ran its first deal in Portland on 1 June: twenty dollars of Powell's Books merchandise for ten. Five thousand vouchers went in a matter of hours. New York and the Bay Area followed on 12 July. The mechanics were the ones everybody knew by then, an email in the morning with a local deal and about a day to decide.

There was one real design difference and it fell in the customer's favor. A Groupon deal had a tipping point, where enough people had to buy before anyone's voucher became valid. A Google Offers voucher was good the moment you bought it, however many others did. Google could afford to guarantee that and Groupon could not, because Groupon needed the threshold to make the merchant economics work at all.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

For about eighteen months this looked like a real business. Offers spread across a few dozen American cities and got wired into Google Maps, so a deal could surface where you happened to be standing. Payments moved onto Google Wallet. A Chrome extension arrived on 4 July 2012, and in March 2013 offer extensions came to AdWords, which let any business hang a promotion directly off its search ad.

Google also bought its way in abroad, acquiring the German deals site DailyDeal in 2011 and then selling the company back to its own founders seventeen months later. That is about as clear a statement of retreat as an acquisition record can make.

~ the fall ~

The daily-deal category broke for everyone at roughly the same time and the reason was structural. A merchant who ran a deal got a flood of customers who paid half price once and never came back. Do it twice and you have trained your neighborhood to wait for the coupon. The supply of businesses willing to be used that way was finite, and by 2013 the good ones had worked it out.

Google's version carried an extra problem. Selling vouchers means a sales force calling restaurants one at a time, which is not a thing Google is shaped to do. Groupon at its peak employed thousands of people doing exactly that. Google kept trying to turn the product into something that could run without them, which is how it ended up as coupons attached to search ads instead of a deal in your inbox.

~ what it became ~

The shutdown was announced in early March 2014 and it was quiet even by the standards of a Google closure. There is no blog post anyone remembers. The self-serve product went first, and the pieces that had proved useful simply stayed where they were. Offer extensions lived on inside AdWords and the payment plumbing had already been absorbed into Wallet.

Turkey got the same wave about a year behind the United States, local clones first and then Groupon itself. So the category reached me and the product never did, which is the usual arrangement for a Google service that lives inside a list of American cities. I watched the deal-site boom happen in Turkish instead, and it burned out on the same schedule for the same reason, without needing Google's help to do it.

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