CardStar, which has around 1.5 million users of its mobile app, announced that now people can access a “Groupon card” to get daily deals close to their current location. The Groupon “card” will exist alongside CardStar’s other service, where users can create new barcodes based on their loyalty card numbers for various retailers, which a user then scans from the phone at the point of sale instead of their original physical loyalty card.
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Groupon’s runaway success has opened up the market to a number of me-too deals services, from the higher-profileLiving Social and BuyWithMe, to smaller outfits that offerplatforms to start your own “Groupon like site”. There are so many clones that some have even taken a stab at top-50 lists. So it comes as no surprise that the biggest of them all will be trying out new things to encourage more loyalty with its users. Today, CardStar, which aggregates various loyalty cards into one app, is announcing that Groupon will be joining its list of retailers.
CardStar, which has around 1.5 million users of its mobile app—1.3 million of the on iPhone, with the other apps being BlackBerry, WP7 and Android, with a Symbian app awaiting approval—says that now people can access a “Groupon card” to get daily deals close to their current location.
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This Groupon “card” will exist alongside CardStar’s other service, where users can create new barcodes based on their loyalty card numbers for various retailers, which a user then scans from the phone at the point of sale instead of their original physical loyalty card.
For now the Groupon deal is limited to relevant local offers being sent to users. CardStar’s CEO Andy Miller tells mocoNews, though, that longer term they may try to incorporate a service where a user buying goods and services through Groupon picks up loyalty points which can be converted into discounts on future items—along the lines of what you get with other loyalty cards. “We’re still taking baby steps with this for right now,” he says.
For now, CardStar will be picking up a commission on any Groupon deal that it “introduces” through its app: the commission varies between two and 15 percent, says Miller, depending on whether the purchase was made directly through the app (better) or via visiting the site later on the mobile web (less lucrative but perhaps more common).
One nice twist with this service is that users who travel can get updates for local deals in whatever city they are visiting. The regular Groupon site isn’t as easy to navigate in this way (or as convenient).
While the service is a crucial one for Groupon as it moves its service more into the realm of mobile, location-based, just-in-time services—surprisingly the company still hasn’t released its own mobile app—it’s also an important advance for CardStar, which not only competes with other services that aggregate loyalty cards, but with apps developed by retailers themselves—and retailers will often push their own apps first with special offers in order to build closer relationships with their users, cutting out middle men like CardStar.
This might be just one early step for both companies. Miller says that the deal is not exclusive on either side—meaning that Groupon is likely to do more third-party integration into mobile purchasing apps through its APIs. Similarly Miller says it is also now working on another agreement to provide the same service with one of the “up and coming” daily deal sites.
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