Google Offers – Google’s Answer to Groupon – Coming Soon

If you stay abreast with what’s happening in the technology world, you’d remember that recently the hottest news doing rounds in the Silicon Valley was how Google came up with a whopping $6 Billion buyout offer for the popular daily deal site Groupon, and how Groupon rejected that. Many people thought that it was quite audacious of Groupon to do that, and Google would eventually come up with its own Groupon clone.

Turns out that Google will do that sometime soon, and the product will be called Google Offers. A number of premier tech publications have reported this. We’ll use Mashable’s story here because that’s the most comprehensive I could find.

According to Mashable and various other sources, Google Offers will offer a daily deal like Groupon and users can buy that in 24 hours if they want the discount. This is how Groupon, LivingSocial and almost all the other Groupon clones work.

It seems that Google might integrate Google Checkout with this service for the payments, and also integrate other Google services in one way or the other.

For any such daily deal service, there’s more work that’s needed to be done offline, than online. The company needs to reach out to small business owners and convince them to list their products on their site. Seems that’s what Google is doing at the moment, and it’ll launch the service with a bang with the support of hundreds of thousands of small business owners.

So, if you are a small business owner, or a consumer like me, there are reasons for you to cheer. Groupon or Google Offers, at the end, it’s a nice daily bargain for us. And for businesses, it means more customers. A win-win for everyone!