Groupon Learns to Show Measured Profits to Merchants

Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN) is a company that can use any bit of good news that it can get. Is allowing merchants to track how well their "Groupon" daily deals are doing considered good news? It is if the company can prove a positive return on investment to its merchants.

The daily deals leader announced that it now has launched the Merchant Impact Report as a free tool built into the Groupon Merchant Center to show merchants exactly how Groupon is driving their business. In short, this allows merchants to see exactly how the performance of their promotion has gone.

Groupon is showing a profit calculator, and it has tried this with more than 1,000 merchants. It also offers marketing analytics and customer insights into the reports.

Today's news is a feature you might have expected to have been there from day one. Unfortunately, it probably has taken this long just to be able to track the effectiveness on a historical basis.

Groupon shares may be down by 3% at $5.07 today, but shares have almost doubled from the lows as the 52-week trading range is $2.60 to $25.84. Groupon's market cap of $3.3 billion is now barely half of what it could have sold for in the Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) proposed $6 billion buyout before it came public.

Below is a screen capture of what the analysis looks like to merchants.

Filed under: 24/7 Wall St. Wire, Consumer Goods, Consumer Product, Internet, Media, Retail Tagged: GOOG, GRPN