Clean It Up
UK Floor Cleaning Forum => Carpet Cleaning Forum => Topic started by: Neil Williams on July 04, 2011, 05:54:34 pm
-
2 in one day, a bit of a record really.
Case 1. trafiki.com who will find you the work for 15% commission
Case 2. groupon.com who work on the principle of discount vouchers so you take on the work at £22 for 2 rooms and although she wouldn't admit so much you then 'upsell' to make the job more worthwhile. Apparently this is quite big in the states and let's hope it stays there.
I got quite a stroppy e-mail after my wife tried to convince this sales woman that all this amounted to was bait and switch ;D
-
i think group on is a good idea, future customers etc...
got the traffiki email today. looks like a win win but i'm guessing theres a catch
-
Just got the Trafiki one !!
-
groupon is a fantastic idea I'm on their mailing list and love getting their offers. for restaurants & hotels stays its brilliant but for carpet cleaning I don't think its a good idea
-
mike
do you not think its a good idea for newbies rather than doing free demo's?
£22 for 2 rooms and a possible custy for life and maybe some recomends, etc.....
-
Derek from the deals I've seen on Groupon they always have conditions, so if I carpet cleaners did it they could put the condition that they also have a least one other room cleaned at the normal price. or that the offer is only available with a 5 miles radius of your home any further out and there is a £20 surcharge.
I've spent £100s on marketing that brought in no work.... at least with this you will cover your costs
-
now i'm confused. ???
anyway, for newbies i think groupon is a good idea.
it would also be interesting to see just how many custies you really get in 24 hrs? when i get offers from group on i find it hard to believe that 268 people have taken the offer up before 9am ;D
-
BE VERY VERY CAREFULL!!!
We know people who have been stung badly with this scheme. If you are going to do it read the small print and understand the concept before you go anywhere with it.
A cleaner used this with the idea he'd do a one off clean and then hopefully sign up a fair percentage as ongoing customers. It cost him over £4000 and not one customer signed him up for a regular clean. Nearly wiped him out.
A local hairdresser used it and forgot to specify exactly what they could get for the offer. They all wanted full wash, cut and dyes etc, again cost her lots and lots of money.
Basically you can be overwhelmed with cut price work which could takes weeks and weeks to clear.
Just put "groupon problems" into google.
-
Groupon are great and take their money but on high volumes people can get stung as some companies put the offer on and can't handle the work so you lose out, we had an article about this in our local newspaper.
Shaun
-
I did a job last week where she had a guy who she booked from groupon for £24 for three rooms. He didnt turn up or answer the phone.
There is no way you will make any money at these prices. You may as well do it for free.
She admitted she thought it was too good to be true.
Mark
-
so does anyone know how much you pay groupon?
and i'm presuming you pay them wether you do the job or not!
-
It works out you get approx £20 per your usual £100 as you need to offer a 65% discount and then pay groupon a % too :-X
-
Yesterdays sunday mail had a story of a sole trader who tried this
eyelash extensions normal price £75 with groupon £25 and groupon keep half
she had to close due to the demand even got abusive calls.
-
people think customers looking for a dead cheap deal from any old company will be life long customers? say you do 2 bedrooms for £22, you do a fantastic job because you need them to come back as £22 for 2 rooms isn't worth it, so you impress them. Then what next time? 2 rooms for £60? then what do they do? any one want to guess? they've seen the companies that use groupong will offer dead cheap services and try their hardest, so they'll go straight backto groupon and find another cheapo. Groupon customers wont be the type to appreciate a good service for a good price, but instead a good service for a stupid price. what needs to happen is you turn up to do the £22 job and then do a crap job, then at least they'll realise then why they need to pay fair money for a good service.
-
Groupon keep 50% of the total sale.
Thing is, it attract cheap sakes not loyal customers. They'll just wait till your next Groupon comes along to get thier carpets cleaned.
Alot of compaines have lost out big time.
Groupn itself is in debt. They turn over $2 Billion a year but thier out goings are huge. To pay all the sales staff and cold callers and the largest part goes to thier google Adwords and other advertising methods they use online (media buys). They spend it quicker than they make it.
Alot of people say they wont be around for long.
-
amazon spent the money quicker then they made it for years too. a lot of successful businesses do this as it's a quick way to expand and make a lot of money. they'll get more and more known and then their advetising bills can go down and their profit up.
-
As I said at the beginning, the only way I can see this working is to upsell on every job to the extreme, which must surely cross the line into the bait & switch scheme. How else can you explain a potential customer believing they will get something done for £22 only to be talked into writing a cheque out for £122
Ryan Air are the masters of selling a flight to the Med for £30 until you try and buy the £30 flight only to find out there's a £70 booking fee, food at £10, coffee at £4 etc etc etc. And how much grief have they been on the end of for doing this.
Either way you're onto a loser. Hard sell and never see that customer and friends again, or go bust in the process working flat out for nothing.
-
I had the Trafiki one today as well - anyone had any dealings with them?
Seems like a no lose situation - you only pay them for work they get you, and you can always add on to the price to cover their fee.
-
Surprised that Enterprise haven't gone for Groupon it's made for them.
Shaun
-
at a guess it doesn't even work for them it's that bad.
-
You have to offer a minimum of 50% discount, although they'd prefer if you offer 60%+, I've heard that they'll lead you to inflate your prices before discounting them (so your not really offering such a massive discount). Then they take 50% of whatever the customer pays, so if customer pays £22 for 2 rooms, you clean 2 rooms for the grand old sum of £11 (minus tax of course..) I've taken part in a few groupon deals, with very little intention of spending anymore with the retailer, so I think the chances of add-on sales are slim. You may make some money on people taking the deal and not using the voucher by the expiry date (I've also done this - doh!). Basically, tread with caution!
Ash
-
Trafiki One is a joke, anyone seen one of there sites? I haven't
-
just signed up to trafiki and sorting out my add for groupon, wish me luck. ;)
-
Well done derek, I assume you'll keep us posted? :)
-
that depends on whether they reposess my laptop when i go under. ;D
-
Interested in the whole groupon thing;
In Brighton a company did groupon a couple of weeks ago with the following terms;
Booking required by phone or email. 24 hour cancellation policy. Domestic cleaning only. Valid Mon-Fri 8am-8pm. Any 2 rooms up to 6m long. Valid within 30 mile radius of Brighton centre.
Price was £28 for 2 rooms - discount of 69% saving £62 off normal £90 price.
318 were brought - totaling £8904 - I was led to believe groupon did a 50/50 on the sales so would it be worth it after time, tax etc?
The company were members of checkatrade which allows customers to send in feedback forms after the job has been completed, Ive looked at their feedback but not many more seem to have been added so cant really see how it went for them?...
We were thinking of doing this as a way of sourcing customers, getting some good before and after pics and experience as only starting up. Just thought it would be a good promotional tool. Do agree with the fact it is kind of a bait and switch as would need hard upsell to make a decent profit but didnt want to play it from that angle - wanted it to be an introduction method, running the risk of not netting any long term custys would prove annoying though - upselling wasnt something we were going to push if we did it. Suppose practice for us would be good though.
Will be interested to see the outcome for you Dereck, keep us posted please.
Cheers, Vickie (Craigs wife)
-
sorry guys, but theres no way i'd do something like that, those that know me know that so sorry to the people that thought i was. i don't sign up to nothing that gets sent via email or cold telesales. even if it was a genuine bargain i'd miss out cos i dismiss everything that comes that way. unless i hear a differnent approach, then i may listen or read. but thats rare, "can i speak to the owner of the business" that sentence alone infuriates me.
i think groupon is good for startups all though after reading up on it, it may have a detrimental effect if you can't handle all the work that comes in. you may start to get bad feedback. just because your doing it cheap doesn't mean you should get an easy ride with your bargain hunters, they are what they are and will want perfection for there tuppence.
so to sum up. i'm off for a maccies. ;D
-
I was just going to say I think Derek might have said that tongue in cheek.
I doubt anyone using a groupon coupon to have their carpets cleaned would become a regular customer, at least not the type of regular customer you would like.
-
ahh never mind dereck - thought i was going to get some insider knowledge on the groupon front that was all! ;D
I think you can set yourself a limit on the amount of deals you sell though so maybe that would stop people getting overwhelmed with work.
I'm going to google to see what other people have found the outcome of doing a deal with groupon is, reading through the thread properly has made me wonder about it now. All this advertising / marketing lark is new for me, well in this industry at least so I suppose its all a learning curve - have been reading up on it a hell of a lot though but want to start off on the right level - obviously not nieve enough to sign up to those crappy sales calls - my husband used to get loads of the suspicious firemans / police / cat sanctuary magazine adverts so pretty wise to stuff like that. He used to always let me answer the phone as I'm pretty short when I know its something dodgy and like to question them as much as possible until they trip up and put their foot in it ;)
Vickie
-
Interested in the whole groupon thing;
In Brighton a company did groupon a couple of weeks ago with the following terms;
Booking required by phone or email. 24 hour cancellation policy. Domestic cleaning only. Valid Mon-Fri 8am-8pm. Any 2 rooms up to 6m long. Valid within 30 mile radius of Brighton centre.
What if both rooms were 6m long x 5m wide? That's 60 sq mt for £28.00 :o add on the possibility that it could be 30 miles away, so travel costs and travelling time, take off groupon charge (50%?)..... £14.00 minus overheads....... no thanks :)
Price was £28 for 2 rooms - discount of 69% saving £62 off normal £90 price.
318 were brought - totaling £8904 - I was led to believe groupon did a 50/50 on the sales so would it be worth it after time, tax etc? No, based on what I put above
The company were members of checkatrade which allows customers to send in feedback forms after the job has been completed, Ive looked at their feedback but not many more seem to have been added so cant really see how it went for them?...
Not all customers will give feedback, you can't force them, sometimes the checkatrade admin staff take a while to type up feedback.
We were thinking of doing this as a way of sourcing customers, getting some good before and after pics and experience as only starting up. Just thought it would be a good promotional tool. Do agree with the fact it is kind of a bait and switch as would need hard upsell to make a decent profit but didnt want to play it from that angle - wanted it to be an introduction method, running the risk of not netting any long term custys would prove annoying though - upselling wasnt something we were going to push if we did it. Suppose practice for us would be good though.
IMO you would be better off getting leaflets printed and doing some legwork yourself, rather than work at stupid rates as above :)
Will be interested to see the outcome for you Dereck, keep us posted please.
He was having a laugh ;D ;D
Cheers, Vickie (Craigs wife)
-
ahh never mind dereck - thought i was going to get some insider knowledge on the groupon front that was all! ;D
I think you can set yourself a limit on the amount of deals you sell though so maybe that would stop people getting overwhelmed with work.
I'm going to google to see what other people have found the outcome of doing a deal with groupon is, reading through the thread properly has made me wonder about it now. All this advertising / marketing lark is new for me, well in this industry at least so I suppose its all a learning curve - have been reading up on it a hell of a lot though but want to start off on the right level - obviously not nieve enough to sign up to those crappy sales calls - my husband used to get loads of the suspicious firemans / police / cat sanctuary magazine adverts so pretty wise to stuff like that. He used to always let me answer the phone as I'm pretty short when I know its something dodgy and like to question them as much as possible until they trip up and put their foot in it ;)
Vickie
no you can't, groupon work on the principle, the more they sell the more they get, you cap the jobs and groupon are capping there profits, they just wouldn't do that, there innit for the money full stop, not to help you get a few jobs. the more aggressive the discount the more they'll promote your add. but capping is something not in there vocabulary.
ps... don't know this for sure but from what ive read from john kellys google search, i bet my latte on it. ;D
-
Helen - think you've hit the nail on the head! no wasting time with groupon and spending the time leaflet delivering instead ;D
re checkatrade, only mentioned it as had no way of gauging deal unless i phoned the company and asked how groupon went for them! we were members for what husband was doing and we always sent the forms off ourselves rather than letting a customer do it; do agree that people dont always send em back & staff can be slow to post on site.
Vickie
-
Helen - think you've hit the nail on the head! no wasting time with groupon and spending the time leaflet delivering instead ;D
re checkatrade, only mentioned it as had no way of gauging deal unless i phoned the company and asked how groupon went for them! we were members for what husband was doing and we always sent the forms off ourselves rather than letting a customer do it; do agree that people dont always send em back & staff can be slow to post on site.
Vickie
I never work out monies that could be earnt on the largest scale, it's too easy to get fooled if you see "you could earn.....thousands"... bring it down to base facts and then see if a job is worth doing :)
The groupon type of thing would be good in some areas of industry and the best I can get my head round would be restaurants.........where the mark up is very high anyway and other than the discount itself people would buy extras without having to be sold to :)
Does anyone know for definate that Groupon take their commission from all vouchers that are purchased, even if the jobs don't go ahead for some reason ???
-
i would guess that the consumer pays groupon direct, groupon take there 50% and then send you the rest with all the details. easy money for them, headache for you if theres a few takers.
-
They send you a few cheques, one 24 hours after deal ends, one 2 weeks after it ends, and one a month later. Not sure if thos timings are right, but the principle is definately true.