Most interestingly, neither of Gilt nor Groupon uses SEO to push their offers. In fact, traditional product offer SEO would kill their businesses. One of the reasons that the merchants can offer lower prices via these services is that the prices will not appear in Google searches and therefore difficult to include in comparison shopping systems.

Unless you’re Google, efficient pricing is the antithesis of profit. Instant, free, ubiquitous, constant, direct comparisons to the competition drives prices towards marginal cost (i.e. profit = zero) quickly. To escape this race to the bottom, information inefficiency must exist. Before the internet became ubiquitous, information inefficiency was the natural state in which society existed. Now it must be manufactured.

Gilt and Groupon have built that inefficiency, and it’s serving them beautifully. They won’t be the last Google has made other product and service segments incredibly efficient, and there’s opportunities to re-obfuscate other portions of their index.

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