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The scarcest resource for every business is time. Discounts, from early-bird dinners to off-season vacation rentals, have always been a way for businesses to managetime. So for a daily deals company like Groupon looking to expand its business into a broad suite of technology solutions for retailers and their customers, a tool that combines discounts with reservation and calendar management is a natural place to begin.
Groupon's reservation product is simply called Scheduler. While it's still in beta, it's free to adopt for all small businesses in the US and Canada (sans Quebec). It can be used with or without Groupon's daily deals, and through either Groupon or the business' site. But for Groupon's existing customers, it streamlines booking and redeeming deals for time-dependent services ranging from spas and salons to yoga classes and car services.
"Many of our customers are still using pen and paper to manage appointments," Groupon Scheduler GM David Katz told Wired. "Like any technology company, we look for ways to automate those processes and remove that friction. So one way for us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors is to give businesses a cool, easy-to-use tool that helps them do that and make their business better. And obviously, we hope that they'll use Groupon" for discounts.
I asked Katz about OpenTable, the site that lets users book restaurant tables online (and importantly, helps restaurants manage those bookings, too.) Scheduler isn't actually competing with OpenTable — restaurants offer different challenges, with resources like tables being used by multiple, fluid parties for indefinite time periods — or hotels, but he described it as like "an OpenTable for everything else."
The front end of Scheduler is super-simple; just a little JavaScript button that lets customers book appointments through a calendar. The back end is also intuitive but slick; retailers can track customers, resources like classrooms or workout tables, and service providers.
It's another example of a growing expansion in online-to-offline commerce, and building services around payments or discounts for both sides of the counter rather than offering payments and discounts alone, all being driven through technology.
"Many people don't think of Groupon as a technology company," said Katz, who works out of Groupon's new technology center in Palo Alto. Katz pointed to Groupon's acquisition and hiring, including its 2011 purchase of OpenCal, which led directly to Scheduler, as a signal that the company was serious about proving its technology bona fides.
"We were the first and are the biggest in the space," Katz added. "We see technology solutions for businesses as an opportunity for us to invest and innovate. That's where our head is."
