10 Reasons why GroupOn will struggle

Yes please don't get carried away with its US $ 15 Billion of IPO valuation ,  they are into an Easy to imitate , Difficult to Sustain business:

1. Location Based Services will be able to provide instantaneous on the move deals.
2. Easily imitable: Comparable services: StealTheDeal, 8coupons, BuyWithMe, Coupang (S. Korea), Half Off Depot, Jasmere.com, LivingSocial,  Thrillist, Woot, OfficeArrow , Groupilicious, CouponYou, My Little Deuce Coupon, CouponDeville, Grouper With A Squeeze of Lemon , Valpak
3. It cannot be a niche player while others can be. Travelzoo launched a Groupon-like daily deals Clone and is now valued at $400 Million after just 4 months
4. With more players, the margins/cuts/commissions will go down.
5. Groupon.cn – .How will you beat this Chinese copycat mastery?
6. Deals will get commoditized : As a user, it doesn't matter from where the email come from whether Groupon or LivingSocial or from anywhere else. With the large number of deals offered, they can just use a daily deal aggregator such as http://www.shopway.com to check the available deals in one go. 
7. At the end what it does is just lead generation, a new customer acquisition channel like non-deal CRM platforms such as  Facebook and Twitter. It can be alternatively done by Google Adwords , yellow pages. There are ample substitutes once the price convergence of the deals will occur.
8. There are more empowering models coming up -Dealo, which plans to allow merchants to post their deals, is a free service and allows the merchant to handle the deal completely from managing the discount amount to setting their own caps and the duration the deal will last (unlike Groupon).
9. The cat will be out soon ! Majority of deals are marked up higher and then discounted. So they are never a big deal in any way.
10. Groupon makes public the amount of money saved by its customer but ask it how many of the merchants are actually making money out of it. Majority of them are just aggressively trying to acquire 'lost leaders' buyers through the hot-credit-card-ready leads generated by Groupon. The challenge is to lock-in these acquired customers.

What Groupon can do?

• Deal Personalization: Extension of contextual advertising.
• Regional sites, rapid market penetration to get the first mover advantage.
• Evolve as Social CRM provider through Groupon Stores.