Overselling is Simple: Just Make it Easier for Customers to Buy

This morning I published a blog on how selling is, fundamentally, a simple process. You just need to make it easier for your customers to buy.

Groupon is a prime example of making sales simple. They remove one of the strongest barriers to purchase: price. In so doing, they make the customer's purchasing decision as easy as it will ever be. The result: a LOT of sales.

Feedback on this morning's blog pointed me in the dircetion of an article in today's Sunday Mail entitled "Demand for Groupon false eyelashes deal causes Glasgow Beautician to Close Salon" - regrettably not the only story of its kind, and certainly not the last.

Groupon, the villain in this sorry tale, is being blamed for selling almost 700 coupons for a beauty business that is manned by only one person. Forcing the business to close its doors, renege on the deal and irritating a shed load of people in the process.

But who's really at fault here?

Groupon can limit the number of vouchers sold - their system enables that. So was it greed, naivety or a simple inability to add up the number of available trading hours and divide them by the number of appointments that's behind the beauty therapist's failure? Well, probably a bit of each of them. And since Groupon is more than up front with business owners about their business model and how it works, one might suggest that the business owner who is entering into a contract with Groupon also has a responsibility to fully assess the situation.

A photographer I know recently did a Groupon offer. He operates alone. There's only so much business he can handle. So he restricted the numbers to no more than 100 vouchers to be sold, and asked for the deal to run on a Saturday (one of Groupon's quietest days). The results? Enourmous traffic to his website, around 70 vouchers sold, improved awareness of his business, new customers and a happy Groupon partnership.

Blaming Groupon for your own rash decision making in business is not the answer. If you don't want to oversell, price the offer differently, or cap the number of vouchers available. One thing's for sure, if you don't ask questions, you're certainly not going to get any answers.