Groupon Deal Costs Photographer a Year's Free Work 209
Andy Smith writes "One professional photographer in Somerset, UK, thought he was drumming up lots of extra business with a special deal on the Groupon group-buying site. Sadly he has ended up committing himself to nearly a year of unpaid work, plus he has to give out over 3,300 free prints." This analysis seems to be based only on the author's observations (rather than the photographer's experience), but the numbers are interesting. It can't work against everyone, though, or I bet there'd be fewer repeat advertisers on the daily-coupon sites.
Good chance to up sell (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA doesn't take into account the chance to up sell his products once in the house. These people could be paying £30 to let a salesman into his house to try and fleece them for all he can. It woulnd't be the first time I've heard of this.
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Precisely, the author of this article is an idiot (Score:2)
This guy lists that he managed to get into 301 houses... let's say that's over a year. Even if he only averages 100 quid a house, he'd mana
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Yes and that's been true for decades. I remember my folks going to a couple of those stupid timeshare talks just so they could get a free cheap gift. They knew they weren't getting the big prize(if anyone ever does, which I doubt) but they'd take the crap prize.
And my mom still collects all of the dead tree coupons and does triple coupons with rebates for brands she'd never normally buy but can get for near free. Once the coupons are gone, back to the regular brands and stores.
So this isn't even a GroupO
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And for decades it has worked for the companies, despite the free-loaders. So, they keep doing it, and people keep free-loading, and nobody is complaining, except for the GP...
A lot of these are gifts (Score:5, Insightful)
We have offered deals through Groupon and generally a lot of them are given as gifts, and promptly forgotten/binned by their recipients.
This is in fact Groupon's business model. You pay for nothing, they keep the money. The business offering the deal only gets paid when they have provided the service.
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We have offered deals through Groupon and generally a lot of them are given as gifts, and promptly forgotten/binned by their recipients.
This is in fact Groupon's business model. You pay for nothing, they keep the money. The business offering the deal only gets paid when they have provided the service.
So, in effect Groupon is a scam?
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That is wrong. I have used Wagjag, Kijijideals.ca and Teambuy
Are not Groupon, you muppet. With Groupon, you do not get paid until the service is rendered. They keep the cash for any coupons not redeemed.
WRONG WRONG WRONG (Score:2)
Groupon pays you 50% of all groupons SOLD, whether they are ever redeemed or not. (at least in the US.) And they pay you about half of what you sell the day after they are sold.
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My wife and I have gone to places that do the Groupon once every few months. Since we've gotten it every time (because the restaurant in question is very good) we asked one of them about it. Remember that restaurants are charged a base amount for food. Then they mark it up based on the work they have to do. This place said people coming in with a Groupon worth $40 often spend $60-100. So yes, they are taking a hit of around $30 from their listed price, but when things are marked up more than 50%, it doesn't
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Most states do not require gift cards to become unclaimed property. If you don't use them, the merchants will charge service fees to the card until the balance is zero, or until the card expires, at which point they are free to pocket the money. (Only a few states require the business to "escheat" the "abandoned" funds[1], for that to happen, the state must not permit fees, and must either forbid expiration, or specify that the money be processed as unclaimed funds upon expiration.)
So i would not b surprise
Making a profit (Score:2)
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you have to make a profit for each sale including the coupon.
That's rather difficult, considering that Groupon expects you to slash your price by at least 50%, and then they typically take 50% of the remainder as their commission.
So unless you can turn a profit while charging <=25% of your normal rates/prices, it's best to think of Groupon as an advertising expense—not a business method.
Re:Making a profit (Score:4, Informative)
you have to make a profit for each sale including the coupon.
That's rather difficult, considering that Groupon expects you to slash your price by at least 50%, and then they typically take 50% of the remainder as their commission.
So unless you can turn a profit while charging <=25% of your normal rates/prices, it's best to think of Groupon as an advertising expense—not a business method.
That's why Groupon, at least in my city, has been steadily going down hill. It use to have offers from worthwhile companies. Now it's limited to high margin service sector companies. Groupon is slowly killing itself. I don't even bother checking anymore, and here's why:
- Laser hair removal
- Pet grooming
- Body waxing x3
- Hair electrolysis (hair removal using electricity instead of lasers)
- Sun tanning
- 50% off wine magazines
- Lipolaser fat removal
- Window and Eavestrough cleaning
So Groupon is really targeted at fat, hairy, pasty white people with dirty windows.
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And yet I'm still not interested :) Has always seemed like too much hassle.
useless it right. (Score:2)
That pretty much sums up why Its been useless to me. I have seen a few restaurant coupons there. But they're places I have no desire to eat at anyway.
I've been getting them for more than 6 months, and never used it.
It can work very well... (Score:2)
You're missing a lot of factors here.
One, about half of groupons don't get redeemed. So you're really only losing 50%, not 75%.
Two, you're only losing 50% on whatever the coupon gets the customer. The key is, you don't want the customer to only buy what the groupon gets them.
For example, if you are a restaurant and you sell $40 groupons for $20, you want to make sure your customers are spending $60 or more to eat at your restaurant.
If you are, say, an amusement park, selling a $35 admission for $10 is st
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Groupon is a good idea, but you have to make a profit for each sale including the coupon. If you don't do that then you shouldn't be doing the promotion. Lost leaders help no one.
You apparently don't own a retail business. Advertising is very expensive and sometimes it's necessary to run a business at a loss in order to get people to notice your business and give it a try. It does help, and can lead to a very profitable business in the long run. Loss leaders can pay off big if done right.
basic business sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:basic business sense (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the author is dead on. Your "reasonable guess" that the photographer was able to do arithmetic is based on the false assumption that the photographer is not an idiot. The thing is, the vast majority of "professional photographers" are idiots, who have no education or experience in either photography or business. I've been a full-time professional photographer for 10 years, and the bulk of the competition is just mind-bogglingly dumb. A photographer in my local market offered a similar groupon and I did the same calculations as the author of this article. The girl wound up selling enough to work for 5 months, 40 hours a week for an $1800 GROSS profit. So that's before paying for equipment, insurance, phones, computers, etc.
The other problem with groupons for luxury services like photography is the kind of clientele they attract. If you're going to offer portrait photography, it has to be done with a high level of quality and service, and therefore a high price tag. You simply cannot compete on price doing button-pusher work because then you're competing with the loss leaders at the Sears portrait studio. So, you have to make something artistic and unique that someone is willing to pay a premium price for or else you're not going to make any money. Groupon customers, however, are by nature deal-seekers. They're people who shop based on price, and are therefore unlikely to come back and pay premium prices for luxury services like portrait photography.
Groupon is just a bad idea for photographers all the way around. You lose a lot of time and money and only really gain exposure to people who make for poor clients.
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Yeah, I'd imagine that insurance is pretty expensive in a high-risk industry like photography. And the computer is only a monthly cost if you're renting it from Aarons; but if you were doing that, they'd already be taking the pictures for you. ;)
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Knock off 20% of my normal service call price, discount refrigerant by 75% and make money.
Keeping in mind R-22 costs around 180USD for 30 pounds and every company in town sells it for at least 50 bucks if not 65 bucks a pound.
Not to mention parts are usually marked up by massive amounts. One local company was selling a simple fan relay that cots $1.23 or so off sale and less than $1.00 when on sale, for $119.00, not to mention the $85 bucks an hour labor charge, a $45 d
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Well for me, equipment insurance is about $1000/year, liability insurance is about $350/year, and then there's auto insurance on the company vehicle.
It was just an example of one of the many minor expenses that come with running any small business. People gloss over it, but it's death by a thousand cuts. The #1 mistake anyone makes with any business is confusing gross and net. And people, owners and customers, do it ALL THE TIME. Of course from a different point of view. Prospective business owners
42% would not repeat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:42% would not repeat (Score:5, Interesting)
According to this survey [screenwerk.com], 42% of Groupon SMBs would not repeat. That's quite a lot, and it's from this and cases like this story that I suspect that the Groupon-like business model will not last too long, once the fad has died.
I'd give you mod points if I had any. The article mentions one of the benefits is "getting good exposure". But it works both ways. If you have to rush to get all 300 done and do a bad job, you've just delivered a product for a lower profit margin and provided yourself with bad publicity - worst of all worlds.
Re:42% would not repeat (Score:5, Insightful)
According to this survey [screenwerk.com], 42% of Groupon SMBs would not repeat. That's quite a lot, and it's from this and cases like this story that I suspect that the Groupon-like business model will not last too long, once the fad has died.
I'd give you mod points if I had any. The article mentions one of the benefits is "getting good exposure". But it works both ways. If you have to rush to get all 300 done and do a bad job, you've just delivered a product for a lower profit margin and provided yourself with bad publicity - worst of all worlds.
I don't understand why anybody would offer such a labor-intensive service via Groupon. Groupon is great for coupons at restaurants and stores and getting exposure for your little hole-in-the-wall store that has cool things but nobody seems to have heard of. It also seems to be great for dentists given the number of ads I get by email every week for dental services. But photography? First of all, that's not really something that's usually based upon a set price. That's something that should be a negotiated price on a per-contract basis. A Groupon would be just fine for, say, $25 for $100 Off Services From Hasselhoff Photography, but $29 for a $200-value remote photoshoot in the location of your choice? That's just ridiculous.
He made a really stupid decision and now he has to eat it. That's all part of running a business. It's not Groupon's fault. But I also don't see anywhere that the photographer himself is complaining... The article doesn't mention any statement by the photographer or have any links to his website. This just seems to be some retarded commentary from the sidelines by somebody who thinks he knows what he's talking about when he says "look what happened to this guy because of Groupon omfg". This whole thing is leaking stupid out of every pore.
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You've got it quite backwards. Photography is virtually always based on a set price for a package or per item on a menu of choices.
It's not a high margin business, and every hour spent negotiating is an hour spent accumulating costs and not making money.
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Looks like http://www.capturedlightimages.co.uk/ [capturedli...ages.co.uk] is his site.
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Plus mass, untargeted exposure isn't everything. Marketshare at the cost of margins has been tried and failed in the past often enough. People protest when you raise prices because they are used to the old deal and most services/products are commodities anyway, to be had elsewhere.
I don't think the business model will disappear (Score:2)
I just don't think it'll get very large.
This kind of business model has existed in only slightly different forms for quite a while. In the 70s, there were large coupon books that were heavily advertised and contained one coupon from each of many businesses.
They gave huge discounts, but you only got one coupon for the company per book. The book was sold for a fee that wasn't so small that you could afford to buy the book and throw away all the coupons but the one you wanted. But if you used many of the coupo
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> I don't see why companies are falling over each other to get into this business space.
Because, just like with patents, it's "on a computer".
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You are assuming that groupon failing is a problem for the owners.
As you say, running costs aren't particularly high, and given how they've spread, long since recouped. As long as it keeps going, they're making a killing at the current rates. If it starts to decline, sell in time to some schmart corporation or keep going until profit becomes too small, then close shop and start a new sca- err, venture.
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There's a good chance that a lot of those 42% won't repeat because they only needed to drum up initial publicity once. Having done it, they don't need to do it again.
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There are 27 million small businesses in the US. If groupon can make $14 * 300 = $4200 per business the potential market is $113 billion. (And that ignores selling to the 58% that said they'd do it again).
That's a lot of money to go through.
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Groupon is a great idea, but if they keep expanding to new areas without considering if the area can support those costs, they lose customer confidence. And that is all they have to actually sell.
Who's Fail? (Score:3)
What Fail? (Score:2)
I can't tell who's fail it is.
TFA doesn't provide any evidence of a failure - read TFA carefully - its someone who has seen the ad on Groupon presenting their own calculations as to its viability (which may be exaggerated e.g. - £5 each for photo frames in quantities of 300+? Has the guy never heard of China? Even retail, one-off at IKEA [ikea.com] you can get them for under £3.)
As several other posters point out, he doesn't include the value of unredeemed coupons.
Nor does he take into account how much extra money the photographer co
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I see what you mean now about the article being a poor estimate at best. When I wrote that I misinterpreted it as a report via the photographer who was claiming he was at a loss and thus someone else drummed up an article around it. I now see what the article is, thanks.
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Or it's nobody's fail and the photographer up-sold 300 new clients on $200 worth of prints.
We're in a similar industry and part of our pricing model assumes that we're not working 50% of the time or more. I know photographers who price their services for even higher rates of underutilization.
Since about half of groupons go unused he only has to do 150. If they do have 50% down time then that's one a day that would have been unpaid time anyway. If they could on average make $50 on additional prints late
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One fail: I think the original price of £200 is too low. Based on three hours of work and expenses, it should be at least £300.
Which would suggest that each punter can be persuaded to buy, on average, enough extras (prints, frames, albums, makeovers) to make up that £100... and the Groupon customers already think they've saved £170, so why not blow it on a big print, normal price £300, at a special one time only, gone as soon as I walk out the door price of £249.95...
No Empathy nor Sympathy (Score:2)
Am I supposed to feel sorry for, or even relate to, the guy who didn't sit down for 30 minutes at the most, assuming he's not a business person, and do a break even analysis?
Here, this is a layman's break even in this case: minimum # sales = (desired total revenue)/(groupon take home amount) -(total cost of a package)
Simplistic. You need not know fixed cost or contribution margin definitions, just how much the typical shoot costs you and how much Groupon is going to fork over to you. While this isn't techni
Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
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These sorts of photoshoots are frequently given away for free. Basically, the photshoot is £50, and each print is some huge amount of money. They "give away" the shoot for free, then get you to buy a few prints.
Why this doesn't have a "nothingtoseehere" tag, I don't know.
How is this Groupon's problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
So an idiot offered a deal where he lost money. It's not like Groupon set up the deal, decided on the services offered or set the price and number of packages. That was all the photographer's choice, it's not Groupon's job to decide any of that or do an analysis of the deal. Their job is to sell the coupons.
Stores didn't tell Gillette to charge for the razor, they just sold the blades. It's not the store's job to determine if the manufacturer makes money. Groupon is no different.
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Groupon is not, however, selling deals that puts other businesses out of business. Groupon does not make up the deals, the individual businesses do. You can kill your own business by offering something for nothing, but just because a limited number of better deal coupons exist does not run others out out of business.
I'm not sure I know anyone who would blame gift cards if they had one for a business that went bankrupt. Most rational people would blame the business, not the concept of gift cards. Same thi
Seen it before. Here's what's going to happen. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen nearly-identical "deals" for photography packages on Groupon before. To be a successful commercial photographer, you need 1) equipment 2) a measure of skill and talent and 3) enough business smarts to make enough money for your time.
The move to digital has significantly lowered requirement #1, equipment. Until an photographer starts building a portfolio and eliciting feedback from others (preferably experienced photographers), they won't have a clue as to requirement #2, their skill level. That la
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The move to digital has significantly lowered requirement #1,
Has it really?
I would like to see how much the pro budgets for cameras, optics, lighting, computer hardware, software, peripherals, services and supplies of every sort.
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Now, a dark room, you are going to have film developing and print developing. For film, you might go cheap with a couple of canisters and s
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It depends. the stupid pro that has to have "the best" of everything? far too much, at least $40,000 in hardware for a single portrait shoot.
the smart Pro photographer?
Instead of a Canon 1DS you use a Canon T2i. Saved $1500.00 there.
Instead of L series glass you use decen non L series prime lenses. Save from $1500 - $30,000 depending on lens.
Instead of high end pro backdrops, buy the china crap for $250.00.. Saved $2500.00 there, just buy new backdrops every 1-2 years.
Instead of high end Lighting, ag
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I know that wedding photos can be extremely expensive-- there's equipment, labour, expertise, and covering for dry spells between commissions.
Speaking as someone who's done commercial photography, how much repeat or word-of-mouth business would you say that photographers see, on average? Situations like this always make me wonder h
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Disclosure: I've done some work as a commercial photographer, mostly because I enjoy the occasional change from the usual 9-5 IT work. Feel free to hit up the link in my sig.
Dear Anonymous Coward.
You forgot to turn on your sig in your user preferences.
Promotion isn't always "free" (Score:2)
The way to look at Groupon, or any other kind of coupon/discount deal, is as a form of promotion/advertising.
If you take out a magazine or billboard ad, you're paying up-front for something that may or may not generate new business.
If you set up a Groupon promo, the only cost is to provide your service or product at next-to-no-profit. This is a very small price to pay and you're only paying it for actual clients. If a client winds up not using it within the allowed time frame, you end up pocketing your ha
Those who didnt use the coupon (Score:2)
Did he consider that many people may never actually use the coupon?
(just like people impulse buy games on Steam @ 90%off, but never play them)
He can just go out of business (Score:2)
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It happens often enough.. A company offers groupons then goes out of business. Customers complain to groupon and get refunds, no questions asked.
Except the person who quite likely put a lot of money into going into business, and possibly even went into personal debt, only to be driven out of business at a huge personal financial loss by unwise use of Groupon.
Article (Score:3)
I'm afraid my humble blog has again yielded to the footfall of a thousand stampeding slashdotters. One of these days I really should move to a dedicated server, but for now here is the text of the article...
Beware of the Groupon piranhas eating you alive!
This is a cautionary tale for anyone who may think of offering a deal through Groupon, the group-buying site that promises great deals for customers and great exposure for businesses.
The idea is that, as a business, you offer a special deal on the Groupon web site. For example a restaurant may offer a meal-for-two worth £200 for the bargain price of £80. Groupon takes a 50% cut so the restaurant gets £40 which should be enough to cover the actual cost of the food, plus they've had some good exposure and, hopefully, the few hundred people who bought the deal will go back another day and pay full price. Maybe they'll even become regular customers.
But look at what happened to one independent photographer in Somerset:
He offered a £200 portrait package for £29, which was bought by 301 people.
Let's break that down...
Firstly the photographer will only get £14.50 because Groupon takes half. And if the client pays by credit card, which they probably will, then the photographer has to pay the credit card fee, so he's only getting around £12.
Each shoot lasts one hour, but it can be anywhere the client chooses within 15 miles of Bristol city centre. So let's suppose the total time for travel is half an hour each way, plus 20 minutes to set-up lighting and background and 10 minutes to tear it all down at the end. Already he's up to 2.5 hours so he's charging £4.80 per hour, not taking fuel costs in to account.
"Every photo taken will be put on CD or DVD in high resolution" -- this is fairly trivial, let's say 15 minutes work and £1 for the disc and case. He's now getting the equivalent of £4 per hour.
But the deal gets better! "20 of the images will be professionally edited and air brushed" -- now I assume this is nothing more than a bit of spot removal and some minor tweaks, because there's no way you can do a full retouching job as part of a £29 package, and there's certainly no way you can do 20 of them. So we'll estimate a super-speedy 5 minutes per picture and imagine that he somehow gets the whole lot done in 2 hours. He's now on £2.32 per hour.
Anything else included? Yes! You get "one 12x10 framed print, two 10x8 prints, two 8x6 prints, two 5x4 prints, two 4x3 prints, and two 3x2 prints" -- a total of 11 prints, with the largest one framed. I'd estimate the absolute rock-bottom price for producing those prints will be £8 plus another £5 for the frame if he's buying in bulk. That's £13. That's more than he's getting from each client, and he's got 301 clients to make his way through.
Even if this photographer is doing each job to a bare minimum standard, he has committed himself to nearly a year's work for no money. If that doesn't sound like good business sense to you then be very careful if you decide to offer a deal through Groupon or any similar site. What may at first seem like success could very easily put you out of business.
I feel sorry for the poor guy (Score:2)
I can't help but think that what he really needs is some good business advice, though as he may possibly now end up having to go into hiding from
What is the news, the stuff that matters, exactly? (Score:2)
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This could work out OK. (Score:5, Insightful)
He underpriced his offer, but it doesn't have to be a disaster. It's a workflow problem. The photographer gets to schedule the shoots, so he has to get them organized into blocks in the same area. Many people won't have a location in mind, and he can get them to go either to his studio or to one of several pre-selected scenic locations. Once set up in a location, customers can be run through in an hour each. Customers who insist on a specific location have to wait longer for a time slot to open up.
The post-processing work is also a workflow problem. For most shots, a minute or two in Photoshop is enough. Those can be farmed out to an intern, or even some site like GetAFreelancer. The paper printing, DVD making, and framing gets done in bulk, with bids from various companies.
If half the people who bought the coupon actually use the service, and the photographer is organized about it, it's probably about six weeks of work.
The photographer can up-sell. Want hair, makeup,or costuming? Available for an extra charge. Some of the business will be wedding-related, and that's an opportunity to sell a whole wedding package.
A Similar Story (Score:4, Informative)
"Cupcake Gallary" (a small Chicago bakery) got stung because Groupon essentially gave them an ultimatum. They declined and Groupon cancelled all the previous Groupons.
http://www.uptownupdate.com/2011/05/groupon-cancellation-cupcake-gallery.html [uptownupdate.com]
I think Groupon is a great idea, but this type of bullying douchbaggery to their "partners" is making me rethink ever using them.
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Douchebaggery is a superb word and I will be using it in conversation at some point this week :-)
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Groupon wasn't the bad guy there either.
Don't understand (Score:2)
How can this be groupon's fault?
I don't understand. They didn't force the photographer to create that ad. As well, perhaps the photographer has more business sense that the poster, and has figured out a way to do this at a profit.
Either way. This is an undeserved dig at groupon. It is simply a business arrangement! If you don't like it, you should be able to tell that before using them.
Of course, the other option is the photographer is an idiot, like a lot of people out to make money quick, and did not
And that scumbag deserved it. (Score:2)
Honestly Whoring yourself at gutter prices? the man deserves it. what he promised he was completely insane to offer at that rate.
Oh and those thinking that he will make money on stock photo sites... No he wont. you can't sell them to a stock photo site without a full model release from the person in the photo, Owning copyright does not mean crap if you dont have a release from the model that says " you can do anything you want with these images, yes even using my image to advertise massive herpes outbr
Not really (Score:2)
Even if the guy only gets ~12 pounds out of the deal, as the article suggests, he can easily make that up by buying materials in bulk and following the letter of the deal. 12 pounds equates to ~$20 usd.
1) You can bet the framed photo in the deal is for a cardboard photo frame...a box of 350 of these cardboard frames can be bought for $250, or the equivalent of $0.71 per frame. These are 8x10 (I couldn't find 12x10 frames), so lets add some more to that and make it $1 each for the cardboard frames.
2) Even
Article is just guessing (Score:2)
The article's author has no idea what this guy's finances are, what sort of company he operates behind his name etc.
For all we know he has several staff who handle post processing and a deal with a print house for cheap prints.
The author literally doesn't know what he's talking about because he didn't actually bother contacting James Corrin to find out why he did the deal, what he's getting out of it etc.
Re:Clueless author (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, this has been a known problem for a while. Groupon typically recommends that businesses set some sort of a limit on the number of coupons available, at least during the first try to see what the response is and to verify that you can handle the extra business. While I do have sympathy for business owners that fail to heed the recommendation, it's hardly Groupon's fault if you don't set any sort of limit on the number of coupons being sold.
Now, had this been a glitch on Groupon's side, that would be completely different.
Re:Clueless author (Score:5, Interesting)
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What if he has calculated that he can make a nice profit by selling them additional services? What if he has some students working for free and he is "outsourcing" the job to them, so that the students get experience and pass the class in school? What if..? You get the idea.
Be it any way, if he has a good enterpreunish idea that the day-jo
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Yeah my guess is he's got to be hoping for upsells of some sort. Doing this much work for "free" is basically just getting his foot in the door, which may be more than he had before. Perhaps it will work out or perhaps it won't. Time will tell I suppose.
Re:Clueless author (Score:4, Insightful)
It could also be that "Captured Light" is a group of contracted photographers... their website doesn't list any photographers by name. 10 of them doing 1 month of work each over the course of a year isn't unheard of for promotion purposes. Also, they're probably sending out their juniors who are going underused. Photographers everywhere have been hurting as of late. They could batch up the retouching and printing (or ship that overseas), and reduce the overall cost of the promotion.
It really depends on how big Captured Light is.
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Re:Clueless author (Score:5, Informative)
"It's possible that it's a group, though with copyright assignment only going to Tim Jones I tend to doubt it."
That is not uncommon. It makes it much easier than assigning copyrights to each photographer@group if you ever have to go to court. Court isn't only for people who try to reprint / copy / claim the work as their own, it is actually more common to have to take someone to court over non-payment for services rendered. I should know, I have a photography business I do as a side job. 9/10 clients are great, they pay on time, don't bitch about every tiny thing and don't try do weasel out of paying for services in any way they can. The last 1/10 is what the courts are for, at least as a last resort.
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Maybe local business owners in your area can start maintaining a shared database or exchanged registry of problem customers especially the deadbeats who don't pay their bills. One business puts a customer on that list, you all refuse to do business with that person. What you would find is that the same individuals cause problems wherever they go. I'm tired of the way asshats never have any consequences. Aren't you?
Hmm, boycotting individual customers. I shall be glad to see how you hope to avoid having to sell everything you own to make a futile attempt to fight off the inevitable enormous compensation payment. Seriously, maintaining a sh*tlist (especially one which you distribute to someone else) is never a good idea, no matter how smart an idea it seems when you start.
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I don't believe the author of this article knows what he's talking about in regards to the photography business.
According to his byline, Andrews Smith is a newspaper photographer. You somehow forgot to tell us about your experience in the photography business.
Re:Clueless author (Score:5, Funny)
So is Peter Parker. If Groupon were so evil, why wouldn't Spider-Man be fighting them?
Re:Clueless author (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have connections to the professional photography industry, in the form of a now-closed family business.
A comparable print package from a professional lab costs a few dollars. The blogger's estimates are on the high side in that regard alone. The basic airbrushing and editing is a somewhat common freebie from a lab, partly as a way of hiding processing defects (painting over dust spots on the paper). It gets even more disgustingly inaccurate when you factor in the cost of a minilab print [minilabhelp.com]. If the photograph
Re:Clueless author (Score:5, Insightful)
He's making a big assumption that the people buying these will buy nothing else from the photographer. It's highly likely that he will stiff them for extra prints/copies on DVD, and/or get a load of extra contracts out of it. I can see the photographer making good money out of this.
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Brought to you by Slashdot... The site for free advertisement disguised as 'news'.. pretty thin disguise... and remember, there's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell the name right
They don't even need to do that as long as the link works.
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Indeed. And Groupon offers a no-questions-asked refund policy (at least in the US), so if the availability sucks, the buyer can get a full refund.
As far as the deal for the photographer, this is just an example of someone who didn't understand the business consequences of what they were doing when they did it. If the photographer had simply done £100 and required the shoot to be at this studio, he'd have done pretty well for himself. Or, he could have gone with the upsell model - offered a very bas
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But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who says he's going to be run out of business?
The guy who wrote the article doesn't know what he's talking about.
I've talked to a good 40 business owners who have used Groupon. Some things that the author of the article totally ignored:
1) Only about half of the Groupons get redeemed
2) If redeemed after the expiration date, they are only good for the face value paid. I.e., if you buy a £200 Groupon for £29, and you don't redeem it before expiration, then you just get £29 off the price of whatever you buy.
3) Upselling is key. For restaurants, when they sell a $40 Groupon for $20, they're betting you're going to come in with some friends and spend $60 to $100 on dinner. I do a lot of work in the recreational activity sector, and there they often do groupons for 50% off a basic package, then once you are there upsell you to a bigger package at full price. In the case of our photographer, if he does it right he'll be getting people to buy £400 or £600 photography packages - "You already are getting all this for £29, look what I can add to it for only £100 more!"
Now, maybe this groupon won't work out great for this one business, but Groupon can work very well if you set it up right and treat it as what it is supposed to be - an advertising/sales lead channel.
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I realize slashdot is into the whole libertarian dog eat dog business thing, but it's really in Groupon's best interest to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen, in particular when they're dealing with so many smaller businesses that might not have all that much expertise and probably aren't totally familiar with the business model. Yeah, the guy shouldn't have done the deal in the first place, but he didn't know what he was getting into and it looks really bad for Groupon to be running their own customers out of business (and it's a pretty terrible long term strategy)
Groupon doesn't care if their customers fail, new businesses are cropping up all the time. As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. And Groupon gets 50% in the meantime, sounds like a sweetheart deal to me.
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That's kind of the point. Companies are still figuring out if it's worth it or not. That's what the post is about. I've also heard that a lot of restaurants hope to make money because groupon customers will bring a friend or buy more than the coupon is worth. I've heard (through the planet money podcast) that customers just haven't been buying much over the coupon value, which makes it harder for restaurants. Again, it's an explorator
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Photographers generally are not math majors.