What do you think of shopping coupons sites(like Groupon)- startup costs, viability?

Shopping coupon sites like http://www.groupon.com/ are suddenly popular.
What would be the initial technical/ development cost to set up such shopping site? Presumably, the marketing and promotion cost will be much higher than the technical/ development costs.
How viable are such sites?

 

Getting a big enough audience to get the leverage to get the same type of offers as Groupon is what you need. And unless you can beat Groupon on price/selection, which will be near impossible with their buying power, you'll have top beat them by spending more on marketing.

 

It's business on steroids, if you have access to $1.12B then you can inflate the value of a lot of things. Like YouTube's sale to Google it dosn't even have to make money, infact it's perfectlly ok for most start ups to be losing money at the time an acquisition takes place.

I'm sure one day the party for these guys will be over, and they'll all have to start looking for a real job that serves a real economic purpose.

 

Sites like this are brilliant if designed and promoted properly. Not sure the cost for such a site but I wouldn't imagine it would be cheap to start one from scratch and make it successful.

 

they are popular nowadays, but their product range isn't large..
always same products..food, spa, massage

 

For development costs it will be around $500-$1000. Lot of developers offer ready made Groupon clone script for download. But promoting a site like Groupon is difficult, you must have strong e mail data base like groupon.