John H.

I have been a Groupon Merchant for 4 years now. The first 2 years? Fantastic! A lot of sales, revenue of $500,000 a year, wife finally quit job and was able to take care of the small babies. Move forward to 2017... my worst nightmare... Some idiot decided to implement a Program called "Merchant Graduation". Once a seller reaches a sales threshold of $1,000 in 30 days, they get to graduate to Level to which is $5,000 in 30 days. But wait... there's a catch! They have a Scorecard which the metrics need to be all GREENS before graduating to Level 2. I was not graduated for 4 MONTHS! 4 LONG MONTHS! When I finally complained as to why my account has not graduated they stated that they did not have an answer for me but that they would send a request to the people that handle Merchant Graduation. Low and behold, I finally graduate to Level 2... I made $5,000 in three weeks. Account gets suspended again. While account is suspended for review, I receive an email stating that I have been demoted to Level 1 again because I had a red metric on C2M. For any real professional seller out there, let me explain to you what C2M is... Customer 2 Merchant. Can you actually believe that? This people actually have a metric for how many times a customer opens up a ticket. So all those questions about "Product Questions, Order Cancellation, Address Change Request, Asking about Tracking Information (while it's displayed there), Wanting to know about more color options". Yep, you heard me... better yet... you read it... you get penalized for customer inquiries like that. So instead of the $400,000 I was making a year, I'm around $50,000 for this year. When the account gets back to being reinstated, you lose your algorithm and good views on Google. So it's like starting from zero all over again. I had had products that used to sell over 10 a day, now some of them not even 1 for a whole month. Also! Beware of Returns! Groupon sometimes refunds your customer quietly without sending you any notification, email or any type of communication. I had had returns/refunds that I only found out because I was curious to look on the "Returns Tab". Customers don't even need to return the products, or even open up a ticket with you for getting a refund. They just contact Groupon and they refund the customer without contacting you or not letting you even know. They also close listings due to "Low Ratings". Sometimes I think they do it if they think you are making too many good sales out of an item as I asked to see my ratings out of a closed listing that had sold over 500+ pieces and 95% of the complaints were due to USPS slowness. So instead of closing a product because of the actual PRODUCT review, they close it based on USPS speed. They also don't take into consideration the people that don't rate the product. They can't seem to understand that this is not Amazon. Out of 100 orders, 70 customers will rate the product. Groupon customers like to get deals, quality items for cheap prices, they won't leave the most honest reviews. Instead of balancing out the bad reviews with the people that don't leave reviews(probably satisfied with order) they just judge the ratings only on the people who review. Really smart right? Leave it to the Groupon "Dream" Team to show your listings only through the website instead of app and website (generate more sales), To close the listings based on only the bad reviews that have nothing to do with the product itself, To refund items quietly without contacting the merchant (that does not sound legal at all), To create a Program that limits a seller's growth and potential while stopping production for days or weeks and playing with the algorithm of listings which creates 0 sales DAYS. Thank you Groupon, it was a pleasure working with you at the beggining but I'm leaving for greater and bigger things like AMAZON. Where they DON'T suspend seller accounts for reaching threshold(they don't even have that) where they DON'T limit the amount you can make a month, where the algorithms are well designed for $300-$1000 sales a day. Where they contact you before refunding a customer, where customers can look up your items either desktop or mobile. Where liberty and justice stands for all.