Such different discounts

Hello, dear Habra community!

From the very beginning of our startup, we thought that it was time to start a corporate blog on Habré. As long-time Habra readers who have gathered a lot of useful information on their favorite portal, we are now happy to share it with others.

You may want to start a blog for a long time, especially when your project is developing rapidly, there are always not enough people in it, and thoughts about the blog are postponed until better times, but a few days ago one beautiful providence under the nickname Alizee made us hurry.

This nice girl published her post-investigation “How it really works ...” and did not leave us any chances for further inactivity. The fact is that the analyzed Alizeegroup shopping service is our direct competitor. But we, in no case, will not pour mud on them or, conversely, pour traffic to their mill. We just want to tell a little to the readers of Habr, where this idea came from, and how similar services work in developed countries. Incidentally, they are very popular there, and in terms of the dynamics of the growth in the number of users, they are ahead of almost all modern Internet projects.

So, our project “City24” www.gorod24.com.ua , and the original American analogue www.groupon.com , and many similar sites around the world, say, German www.citydeal.de (recently, by the way, bought Groupon) or Japanese www.piku.jp- these are group shopping services with a discount on the Internet. From the point of view of the business model, everything is simple: the companies participating in the project provide big discounts on their services or products, and in return receive new customers, and most importantly - wide coverage of the Internet audience (read - the most active customers) in a short time, as well as a loud resonance in online media and communities.

Throughout the world, the scheme works as follows: the user pays for a service or product at a discount on the site, then receives a coupon (or certificate on our site, because, due to our native Ukrainian characteristics, we don’t like the word “coupon”) and pay it to the institution. Thus, this service is absolutely free for the user. Moreover, sites carefully monitor that the offer is fair and as unique as possible for their visitors (without additional fees, hidden fees and the like).

Unfortunately, in Russia and later in Ukraine, some guys decided to change the scheme and began to offer not a service or goods at a discount, but often sell the right to a discount, i.e. a coupon that gives you the right to receive a discount, and does not pay for the service itself or product. Thus, the discount service for you becomes paid, and in the institution you are forced to pay the bill again.

Moreover, as follows from the Alizee investigation, one of the Ukrainian services offered to "buy a discount" on a publicly available share, as well as a discount on goods with hidden payments, but this is on their conscience. We hope this is just a misunderstanding. We are sorry that such a promising service is discredited from the very beginning. And we sincerely hope that one negative example will not become an obstacle for many of you to try these services and take advantage of their truly advantageous and interesting offers. For our part, we will do our best to gain your trust.