Live Shopping: Groupon Obtains Additional $5 Million Capital

After the visible successes of companies like Woot! and Vente-Privée, live shopping startups are currently enjoying good financing opportunities, particularly in the US. According to reports, in addition to an original seed capital round of $1 million, Groupon secured $5 million this past summer from New Enterprise Associates.

Since November, Groupon has been implementing an idea which has been constantly talked about during our Live Shopping Days conferences: local, web-based live shopping campaigns:

"There is an interesting experiment happening on the web. The e-coupon site Groupon.com offers one deal a day in sixteen cities across the USA. They just added three new cities — Miami, Philadelphia & Austin — and hope to be operating in over thirty urban areas by year's end."

We profiled Groupon in February on the LSD blog (GE/EN). And the site seems to have developed very well since then. The Bits Blog of the New York Times has quoted some first figures:

"So far, more than 200,000 groupons have been sold to the 500,000 people signed up for one of Groupon’s city-specific newsletters.

Mr. Mason said the company hopes to generate $75 million in revenue over the next 12 months. “We have a lot of exciting plans and ideas about where we can take this,” Mr. Mason said."

Another good article is from the Washington Post. The Goupon model is also and especially exciting for mobile live shopping campaigns.

Related posts:

• eBay Germany’s Wow! Campaign Makes 10 Million Euro in First 6 Months
• Kids.Woot!: Woot! Launches Fifth Live Shopping Spinoff
• 5 Years of Woot! - A Business Model Takes Over The World

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.