Hmmm that seems a little odd... I have never seen signs like that... I thought the whole point of businesses using groupon is to attract new customers, so why would they treat them any differently?

It's common sense that any appointment based business would need people to call ahead of time :-)

So I applaud them for taking that approach, rather than being the typical SMB that used Groupon and then blames Groupon for a lack of marketing systems to get customers to come back & for "flooding" them with too many customers at once... when in all reality none of that is Groupons fault.

@Stephanie to piggy back on this. You're absolutely correct.

This business owner is def on to something. I've heard and read the horror stories of business owners having to close their businesses for good behind not being prepared for the Groupon effect.

By making Groupon customer make a reservation, this ultimately allows the business owner the chance to pace themselves thus ensuring the proper resources are allocated to Grp customers.

It also, if the biz owner is marketing savvy, allow them to engage a bit more with the Grp customer or at the very least have them fill out some form of survey to learn more about them versus the walk in customer.

This is actually a great idea to present to biz owners who're currently using Groupon to help them build list which is usually nonexistent and ultimately a more profitable business .

I have seen it a few times from smart business owners. Unfortunately, would you like to guess out of the 40-50 Groupons, Living Socials or deals of the day I have purchased, how many business owners have done a follow up contact or even tried to get my contact info?

That would be a big fat zero and that is a major reason why so many business owners blame Groupon instead of themselves in keeping the new customers. It does not help that typically Groupon customers are more likely to be less loyal to a particular business and more loyal to the cheapest price / best value.

Come to think of it, I bought a Gymboree groupon a few months ago.

I called the center to ask a few questions and signed up for a play time for my daughter. After doing this, I began to receive daily mailers via email from them. They're a larger company and would have larger marketing budgets in place.

Some companies can go to the extreme with customer contact which is quite rare but small businesses really need to stop blaming Groupon, the government, the president, the dog, the cat or anyone in between and just get their customer acquisition and fulfillment working on all levels.

Yea, I'm glad to see that actually... they probably had some advice, and chose to follow it.

I was working with a gal who owns a cafe who just ran a groupon (she is a friend from another forum so I just was chatting with her for free) and I TOLD HER 800 times to setup some kind of follow up mechanism and put into place some kinds of other provisions so she didn't get swamped and go broke.

Did she listen to me? No... well, OK, she sort of did... but... her response when I asked her how it went was

"I sold over 150 deals, and you were right.... good thing they didn't all come at once or I'd be closing..."

Then she says "I didn't do what you said though, because I didn't see the need... and people have been promising me they'll come back because my food is so good.."

(Facepalm)

Well, OK... but you still didn't get them into your sales funnel, so really, they can tell you whatever they want... her food IS awesome... but it's hard to get people to understand what goes beyond that in making the most $$ possible.

I din see any sign with this but i found out that lot of Groupon Deal do include terms and condition that need to do booking with the vendor before going , only able to use the voucher.