Thank you, Wise Bread! A few weeks ago, I hastily bought a discounted four-class pass to a local (Charlotte, NC) yoga studio on LivingSocial and have been looking for a way to unload it. I just posted it on DealsGoRound (fingers crossed!).
Selling Your Groupon Coupons
Social shopping sites like Groupon and LivingSocial are all the rage these days. Instead of hunting for a deal on your own, these sites create deals for a certain number of people. If that number is met and enough people are interested, the deal is on.
Otherwise, no deal.
Groupon is becoming so popular that stores are complaining they can't handle the amount of traffic a Groupon deal can generate.
So what happens if you see a fantastic deal but you can't take advantage of it for whatever reason? Well, you could try to get your money back (Groupon offers full refunds), but that won't always work. And if it's a really good deal that a lot of people want, wouldn't it be cool if you could sell it to the highest bidder?
Now you can.
Enter sites like CoupRecoup and DealsGoRound. They bring together people who have deals they want to get rid of with people who missed out on said deals and want in. If you have a coupon you no longer want, you can sell it. If you want access to a deal that you missed, you can buy it.
It makes sense that sites like these would pop up with the soaring popularity of services like Groupon, but there are concerns about security and fraud. Duplicating Internet coupons is a pretty simple task, and are stores really going to triple check coupons to make sure they're legit?
I'm curious to hear what Groupon users (and other social sites) think about sites like CoupRecoup and DealsGoRound — are these valuable services that you'd use or it just extra work for no real payoff?
Staff Writer
Carlos Portocarrero
Check out more of Carlos at The Writer's Coin, where he strives to become the Michael Lewis of personal finance.
Best of Wise Bread
Thank you for the article WiseBread! I'm Kris, the founder of DealsGoRound. In the five plus months we've been running the website, we haven't heard of a single problem with fraud; however, we certainly aren't discounting that risk. As the deal providers and merchants get better at tracking the deals, I hope to be able to leverage that capability, as well. We do have a couple projects in development as I write this to help where we can.
I can tell you that people are definitely benefiting from DealsGoRound in the cities where we are starting to build a following. I actually get "thank you" emails once in a while which is nice :). Right now, we are doing our best to spread the word and get as many eyeballs on the website as possible. The more people we can get on the website, the better chance people like Leslie have of unloading their deals.
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