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Groupon Deal Costs Photographer a Year's Free Work
Andy Smith writes "One professional photographer in Somerset, UK, thought he was drumming up lots of extra business with a special deal on the Groupon group-buying site. Sadly he has ended up committing himself to nearly a year of unpaid work, plus he has to give out over 3,300 free prints." This analysis seems to be based only on the author's observations (rather than the photographer's experience), but the numbers are interesting. It can't work against everyone, though, or I bet there'd be fewer repeat advertisers on the daily-coupon sites.
TFA doesn't take into account the chance to up sell his products once in the house. These people could be paying £30 to let a salesman into his house to try and fleece them for all he can. It woulnd't be the first time I've heard of this.
Indeed, this has been a known problem for a while. Groupon typically recommends that businesses set some sort of a limit on the number of coupons available, at least during the first try to see what the response is and to verify that you can handle the extra business. While I do have sympathy for business owners that fail to heed the recommendation, it's hardly Groupon's fault if you don't set any sort of limit on the number of coupons being sold.
Now, had this been a glitch on Groupon's side, that would be completely different.
We have offered deals through Groupon and generally a lot of them are given as gifts, and promptly forgotten/binned by their recipients.
This is in fact Groupon's business model. You pay for nothing, they keep the money. The business offering the deal only gets paid when they have provided the service.
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This just seems like basic business sense: don't enter into unprofitable agreements. The photographer put a limit on the number of these offers. It seems like a reasonable guess that he was better able to do the arithmetic than the article author, who is purely speculating that this came out to a net loss.
According to this survey, 42% of Groupon SMBs would not repeat. That's quite a lot, and it's from this and cases like this story that I suspect that the Groupon-like business model will not last too long, once the fad has died.
So is Peter Parker. If Groupon were so evil, why wouldn't Spider-Man be fighting them?
It does't say a professional photographer does it? It just says photoshoot. They could be keeping the interns busy. But a decent chunk of these things never go claimed, and I am sure there are things that they can upsell the groupon buyers on.
In fact, if you look at the small print of the offer it does say "subject to availability", so at any point if the photographer felt that take-up was too high he could have called a halt and said "no more available". He doesn't have to set a limit with Groupon; according to a recent consumer affairs program on UK TV it's not unusual for people to buy Groupon vouchers and have them declined by the business because of oversubscription.
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He's making a big assumption that the people buying these will buy nothing else from the photographer. It's highly likely that he will stiff them for extra prints/copies on DVD, and/or get a load of extra contracts out of it. I can see the photographer making good money out of this.
"It's possible that it's a group, though with copyright assignment only going to Tim Jones I tend to doubt it."
That is not uncommon. It makes it much easier than assigning copyrights to each photographer@group if you ever have to go to court. Court isn't only for people who try to reprint / copy / claim the work as their own, it is actually more common to have to take someone to court over non-payment for services rendered. I should know, I have a photography business I do as a side job. 9/10 clients are great, they pay on time, don't bitch about every tiny thing and don't try do weasel out of paying for services in any way they can. The last 1/10 is what the courts are for, at least as a last resort.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
He underpriced his offer, but it doesn't have to be a disaster. It's a workflow problem. The photographer gets to schedule the shoots, so he has to get them organized into blocks in the same area. Many people won't have a location in mind, and he can get them to go either to his studio or to one of several pre-selected scenic locations. Once set up in a location, customers can be run through in an hour each. Customers who insist on a specific location have to wait longer for a time slot to open up.
The post-processing work is also a workflow problem. For most shots, a minute or two in Photoshop is enough. Those can be farmed out to an intern, or even some site like GetAFreelancer. The paper printing, DVD making, and framing gets done in bulk, with bids from various companies.
If half the people who bought the coupon actually use the service, and the photographer is organized about it, it's probably about six weeks of work.
The photographer can up-sell. Want hair, makeup,or costuming? Available for an extra charge. Some of the business will be wedding-related, and that's an opportunity to sell a whole wedding package.
Who says he's going to be run out of business?
The guy who wrote the article doesn't know what he's talking about.
I've talked to a good 40 business owners who have used Groupon. Some things that the author of the article totally ignored:
1) Only about half of the Groupons get redeemed
2) If redeemed after the expiration date, they are only good for the face value paid. I.e., if you buy a £200 Groupon for £29, and you don't redeem it before expiration, then you just get £29 off the price of whatever you buy.
3) Upselling is key. For restaurants, when they sell a $40 Groupon for $20, they're betting you're going to come in with some friends and spend $60 to $100 on dinner. I do a lot of work in the recreational activity sector, and there they often do groupons for 50% off a basic package, then once you are there upsell you to a bigger package at full price. In the case of our photographer, if he does it right he'll be getting people to buy £400 or £600 photography packages - "You already are getting all this for £29, look what I can add to it for only £100 more!"
Now, maybe this groupon won't work out great for this one business, but Groupon can work very well if you set it up right and treat it as what it is supposed to be - an advertising/sales lead channel.
paintball