Sell your products on Groupon – Help Center

The reseller Groupon provides you with a large and captive audience looking for deals.

While you might not want to offer discounted tickets during peak hours, resellers like Groupon are a great opportunity to increase sales by using the channel to sell off-peak capacity and build your audience.

This article outlines how to set up our integration with Groupon and how to redeem and report on bookings made on Groupon.

In this article:

Overview
Get started with Groupon
Configure Groupon offers
Guest view
Redeem Groupon bookings in POS
Report on Groupon Sales

Groupon is currently available to venues located in the US, UK and Germany, with Canada and more European countries coming soon.

Overview

Groupon features daily deals, which are available for purchase during a limited period of time specified on the deal page.

Our integration with Groupon allows you to:

List products from ROLLER on Groupon.
Manage the capacity and price of your Groupon bookings in ROLLER.
Redeem Groupon bookings in POS using the same process as other ROLLER bookings.
Include sales of Groupon bookings in your ROLLER reports.
Updates in ROLLER sync with Groupon every hour.

Supported products and features

Groupon products are configured as regular products in ROLLER with a few additional settings. Currently, the product types and features are:

Supported products	Session passes Standard passes Stock items (attached to session / standard passes as an add-on) Add-ons (attached to session / standard passes)
Supported product features	Product names Prices Capacity Session duration Dates available Valid periods and multi use tickets. For example, you can create a Groupon Standard Pass which is valid for 90 days from date of purchase.

Product descriptions and images are not supported and will need to be added via the Groupon portal.

Get started with Groupon

Before using our integration with Groupon, you must first:

Decide what ROLLER products you wish to sell on Groupon.
Negotiate a contract with Groupon to sell those products at defined prices.

If you have an existing Groupon sales representative you have worked with before, they should be able to kick off this process. If not, then reach out to our support team and we can put you in touch with someone who can assist.

Once you have completed the above steps, it's time to set up your Groupon products in ROLLER.

Configure Groupon offers

To get started with this integration, you must have an account with Groupon and create or update your offers on Groupon.

Configure ROLLER products, prices and availability

From Venue Manager, go to Products > Create product.
Select to create a session or standard pass for your Groupon offer.
Products should be configured as you would usually configure a session or standard pass. If you are a HQ venue user, you can configure Groupon offers as HQ products and then pull those down to individual managed venues as you do with other products.
Ensure the ticket price is inclusive of taxes. Groupon requires that your product price includes all taxes.

Configure Groupon specific settings

Administrator staff level is required to edit Groupon specific fields in your ROLLER products.

In the product, navigate to Ticket Types and select the advanced settings for the specific ticket. Select Groupon > Item is sold on Groupon and complete the following mandatory fields from Groupon products:

Sale Price – The price the item is sold for in Groupon
Original Price – The value of the item before the Groupon discount. Shows as a strikethrough price on the Groupon checkout
Merchant Price – The amount you receive off the sale price. If you don't have this set up correctly as per your agreement with Groupon it will negatively impact your reporting.

ROLLER and Groupon product mapping

ROLLER product IDs must be given to Groupon for the products corresponding to the deals being offered. These IDs can be located in Venue Manager under Settings > Integrations > Groupon, as seen below.

Configuration settings

Disable date selection: This removes the calendar on the Groupon checkout for standard pass products. This will create bookings with a booking date for the day of the transaction, and should be used for passes that are valid for a date range from purchase date.

Report Groupon merchant price as revenue: This will use the Groupon merchant price (the value paid to you rather than the value paid by the guest) as the revenue value reported in ROLLER.

Modify products

Once your products are live on Groupon, any modifications to the product name, pricing and availability may take up to an hour to sync through to Groupon.

Guest view

The ROLLER fields and settings that will be displayed on the Groupon checkout are:

Ticket names and prices (not product name; this is configured in Groupon)
Groupon specific settings
Available dates/times

When a Groupon deal is purchased, the shopper will receive a confirmation email from Groupon which contains their ROLLER booking ID. This can be scanned or typed into the ROLLER POS search field to locate and redeem the booking.

Redeem Groupon bookings in POS

Groupon bookings will appear like any other booking in ROLLER, with customer details and associated tickets that have been purchased.

Staff can redeem bookings made on Groupon as per any normal booking. Optional features such as attaching waivers and adding additional items to bookings can also be performed on Groupon bookings in ROLLER POS.

It’s important that you correctly redeem Groupon bookings as this information will be sent back to Groupon. If the booking is not redeemed, then it may be eligible for a refund if the customer asks for one, as Groupon have a very liberal refund policy.

Redeem standard passes used as vouchers

Standard passes sold on Groupon can also be checked in as per any normal booking. However if the standard pass is being used as a voucher for a session pass product, then you will need to have a method to allocate a session time to guests in order to manage capacity.

For example, you could create a $0 Groupon voucher product (session type product) where you can select session time, then complete the booking without payment in order to allocate the guests to a specific session time.

Report on Groupon sales

Since Groupon sales create bookings in ROLLER, they will appear on your regular ROLLER reports.

There are some important differences in how Groupon sales report compared to regular ROLLER bookings, which are outlined below.

Groupon tender type

Groupon sales will have a transaction against them using the Voucher tender type, rather than Credit Card. This is because the transaction has not been processed via your payment provider.

Reports which have a Payment Type filter will allow you to filter specifically for these transactions.

Deferred revenue

Bookings created in ROLLER from Groupon sales will generate deferred revenue. This deferred revenue is separated from your regular deferred revenue and gift card deferred revenue, into an ‘other deferred revenue’ field. This field appears as a column on the Revenue Recognition Report.

As per regular deferred revenue, this other deferred revenue will be shifted over to recognised revenue when the booking is redeemed or expired, along with any associated tax if applied to the Groupon product.

Reporting on Groupon sales

The best way to report on the sales and revenue generated from Groupon products is to use the Detailed Product Sales Report. This report allows you to filter specifically to Groupon products.

Tax on Groupon sales

If tax is applied to a Groupon product, then the sale price will always be tax inclusive, regardless of your venue default tax setting.

Groupon requires that your product price includes all taxes.

For example, if you sell a $10 Groupon with a 5% tax rate set, $10 will be the after-tax sale amount and the 5% of tax will come off of the $10.