Do not purchase Groupon Clone or daily deal scripts that cost upfront (albeit one-time) hundreds to thousands of dollars, especially if you are new to the daily deal industry, or, worse, new to online marketing/selling generally. Doing so does not align the interest of the vendor with the interest of the daily deal website owner (you). Once one-time payment goes through, vendors have very, very little incentive (whether they do so is another question) to support and continually improve the product for their customers, because their revenue depends solely on the acquisition of new customers.

Anyone in the daily deal industry knows that starting a daily deal website from inception all the way to the generation of sustainable revenue takes time and effort. Vendors that collect a large payment upfront have very little interest in ensuring that the daily deal website’s entire business and technical processes are well-supported. Furthermore, there is no escape valve for 1) website owners who eventually realize that creating a daily deal website is hard work, way more than they were ready to invest, or 2) website owners who eventually discover a better/cheaper/more suitable solution out there. Human beings have the tendency to mull over sunk cost (e.g. “I've paid $1,000 for this script, I better use it and make it work.”).

Buying whole scripts and self-hosting it is like buying an 18-wheeler tractor to drive down to the neighborhood grocery store to buy a candy bar; a bicycle or cab ride would have been more than sufficient. Learning the ropes of the business does not need to be expensive.

I believe that people thinking of entering the daily deal industry should know of all alternatives when it comes to setting up a daily deal website. I am writing this article just to bring to your awareness the lesser known alternative of daily deal platforms, like ours, Zuupy CrowdDeals (http://www.zuupy.com), ChompOn, DailyDealWorks, etc. that either 1) charge a flat, low monthly fee, and/or 2) charge a percentage of your revenue, both of which are aligned with your interests. If we do not support your business well, you either 1) cancel your subscription and cut your losses or 2) make no revenue, lose no money, and thus the vendor gets paid nothing as well, respectively. Besides, we are reputed to be much easier to use; everything is already set up or at least easy to set up, and you will never need to worry about hosting and server issues.

I am even willing to promote our direct competitors above for credibility reasons; go ahead and compare us to the rest out there and decide for yourself a solution that is suitable for you. We who maintain daily deal platforms work extremely hard to provide a platform that is reliable, constantly upgraded, and capable of generating sustainable revenue for our customers, primarily because our financial interests are directly aligned with yours. We earn our revenue from our customers in the form of small monthly payments or commissions by delivering value day after day, not sell to you with vague promises until you are finally willing to part with hundreds of dollars, a one-time event.

I just felt the personal urge to share with anyone out there who needs to set up a daily deal website for the first time the possible risks of buying scripts that you may not even be sure works. All daily deal platforms, including ours, let you try out our software for free for 15 to 30 days, no strings attached. If I can say something on behalf of my company and our competitors, it is that we are sincere in building a long-term relationship with you and helping you grow, because our very livelihood depends on it.

Groupon’s extraordinary growth as a daily deal website is truly enviable for any actual or potential competitor. In fact, it would be seriously tempting to copy any externally-observable tactic employed by Groupon to try to replicate just a fraction of its phenomenal success. Interestingly, one may even say that our daily deal platform, Zuupy CrowdDeals, exists solely to service hundreds of individuals and small businesses whose raison d’etre is to clone Groupon itself.

The truth is that Groupon can get away with a lot of things because of its deep pockets and humungous (read: 9-figure) subscriber list. It can afford to experiment and implement a number of different things, including having a gigantic sales force to hard-sell merchants, having less-than-attractive/tired website designs, producing over-enthusiastic copy, and actively running deals across a ridiculous number of cities. Groupon is like the Amazon of the daily deal industry – it might not necessarily be wise to copy their every move given how different their circumstances are.

Just as you would not run a minimart the way Walmart or Tesco runs their hypermart, you should not run your fledgling daily deal website the way the market leader runs it. You can certainly draw inspiration, but it has to be backed by sound justification – and the only sound justification is really your subscribers/customers saying that they want whatever you intend to copy. Copying blindly without any indication or evidence that the demand for whatever you are copying exists is a waste of time, money, and resources. Find out what your subscribers want by talking to them. When you are small, you probably cannot do things autonomously and get away with it (a la the way Facebook frequently changes its layout and breaches its privacy policy); you need to bend over to some extent to the miniscule number of people who miraculously even care about your daily deal website.

The truth is that all Groupon did was validate the business model (and even then, how validated the business model is remains to be seen given the infancy of the industry). Copying the business model itself may be prudent – after all, if it has demonstrated a clear path to profit, it would be not prudent not to copy it – but copying its design, branding, marketing, and even deal inventory may not be effective, because you have a different set of subscribers with different demographics who have different wants and needs. You probably do not control the eventual make-up of your subscriber list (assuming they are opt-in subscribers, which they better be), as much as your positioning hopes to achieve a certain demographic composition. Design, branding, and copywriting follow who your subscribers and customers are, not vice-versa.

If you are going to copy Groupon with no additional innovation whatsoever, you will not succeed, not even marginally – because Groupon will always be a better Groupon than you can hope to be. You need to be better in some aspects, be they pricing, customer service, value-added content, or niche targeting, in order for consumers to even consider patronizing your daily deal website. Would you rather buy from Groupon or BestSuperSavingsDailyDeals? I know that Groupon will be the safe choice, and, unless BestSuperSavingsDailyDeals can offer something Groupon does not have, I would be better off sticking to Groupon. So would millions of others.