From Online to Everything

If we look back about 5 to 6 years, there was a movement that started to cause glimpses of promising financial volumes and economic returns. It began with voucher codes in order to get cheaper meals up to great discounts for massages and further more it evolved into a long list of benefits that shoppers could prepay and consume in the local shops.

The latter, was clearly one of the first paths from Online To Offline in a somewhat structured way, and we were, no doubt, looking at Group buying and daily deals.

This opportunity generated a huge boom of small companies all around the world chasing this golden business model, however there were only a few leaders who were strong enough to fight the storm and prevail until today.

The velocity in this process by which the business grew was enticed by a key element: the huge discounts and the scarcity of them in time that drove customers to purchase and later get the service; this made practically all purchases somewhat more impulsive than rational or planned. And contrary to the initial aim of the business, it was not necessarily always a “good deal” as it could cause very tight margins and huge of customers at low times where the business was not at full speed with team members, causing exasperation in some customers for delays in service and other problems.

Nowadays, the market and business have been challenged by the rigor of customers, which demand high quality services, in time delivery and fair price (not necessarily huge discounts like before). Also technology has helped along the way making this trend available and easier to access as it grew into mobile devices being even more locally relevant. (read more)