"Open Table vs. Groupon: Party of Two?"

Grace Konopka

OpenTable.com is a great website where restaurants can register themselves and then anyone can go on the internet and book reservations for some of the best restaurants in the area. The website is free, and contains restaurants in all 50 states and even several other countries besides the United States. People can make reservations in a matter of minutes. Recently Open Table has also been a new tool for receiving coupons for some of the high end restaurants in the user’s area. Groupon.com is another website that offers users coupons to everything from dance lessons to amusement parks. This website has users sign up and then they will receive hundreds of offers a month to places in the user’s registered area. To use one of the coupons from Groupon you can either print it offline or bring it up on a cell phone at the store. There are variety of options every day. The question is, which website will be more profitable in the future?

Open Table is website that is directed at “foodies.” The people who visit this website are coming for restaurant reservations and deals. Open Table is in touch with over 14,000 different restaurants and connects everyone to most of the best restaurants in their area. Open Table has tens of millions of emails to users and restaurants, that they can send coupons too. Open Table is a perfect website for the specific user. From here on out there is not much more Open Table can do to expand there company. At this time they have a very specific market place and will have issues attracting people who are not into the restaurant scene. Groupon on the other hand has hundreds of different offers and coupons every day. Users can find coupons for any store or activity that they want. Groupon sends daily emails go their users about the new offers of the day. They specify the offers to the locations of their users, and they will receive different offers from different places everyday. The problem with Groupon is that they overload their users’ email boxes with coupons that their users’ do not have any interest in. They fill up inboxes everyday with some useless information that would most likely lead to users’ ignoring the emails and deleting them.

I believe that even though Open Table is more specific, it has a more promising future than Groupon. Open Table is easier to use and offers more benefits. As an Open Table user I am not afraid to sign up for the website because I know my email will not be bombarded every day with junk email. Also the benefit of being able to make reservations at restaurants minutes before I sit down is more important to me than receiving coupons for dance lessons. I am not willing to sign up for Groupon because I personally receive about fifteen emails a day that I immediately delete, and I am not ready to commit to another website that will send more emails. Both of these are good companies, but like I said I foresee a longer and more profitable future for OpenTable.com.


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_41/b4198037763659_page_2.htm

http://www.groupon.com/

http://www.opentable.com/