They hurt local innovation and ecosystem development in emerging markets from Asia to LatAm to Africa. They come in, hire away talent only to fire them in a few weeks. they damage the budding trust the consumer has in ecommerce.
They are bullies and have a superiority complex boasting about their capacity to execute. They do not have a monopoly on execution. That's a farce.
They are greedy, selfish and generally think only of themselves. Not the consumers they serve, the local markets or their employees.
I have witnessed them come into markets, destroy the lives and dreams of entrepreneurs and employees in emerging markets and shut down abruptly.
Finally, this operation (thier ecommerce operations in particular) is a house of cards. Service quality sucks, customers are lied to and they engage in an epic waste of money
It is impossible to build online retail operations in 1-2 years. Yet this is their objective. Build fluff and sell to some unsuspecting corporate development team.
The problems groupon is facing is inextricably linked to the involvement of the samwers as far as I'm concerned. Elsewhere, flash sales and couponing operations do well. Anything these guys touch is ultimately unsustainable and fluff. Now they want to try online retail with its logistics, warehousing, etc in emerging markets without a long term horizon. Ha! In a few years time you will realize how stupid the praise in this article is.
I'd have to agree. We saw this very recently in the Middle East & Turkey as well.
Out in Dubai it hurt us in terms of talent drain at crazy prices from a number of well established local firms. Their marketing spend helped to grow the local and regional e-commerce market (and still does via ventures that are still operational), but the nature of some of their exits when shutting down has ended up forcing consumers and other stakeholders to re-consider whether to trust e-commerce start ups and businesses in general. Not ideal when the sector is still very nascent.
I'm going to assume you believe what you're saying.
You make it sound as if customers hand away money to a shady stranger who quickly disappears, and that the entire point of the company is to trample employees into the dirt. I have a hard time believing this, especially after all of the examples given in the article.
This is what they do in many cases. Comments about refunds can be found on FB page of virtually all ecommerce operations.
With regards to employees, imagine you live in the developing world, you have a well paying job at a mobile company. The sort of job 95% of the population will kill for.
Rocket shows up, doubles your salary. You quit your job and join rocket. One month later, they decide they are shuttering operations. You are fired through no fault of yours.
This may be fine (actually it isn't) in the developed world but is terminal to career and financially disastrous in emerging markets where job market is not liquid, job opportunities are prized and one individual sustains an entire extended family.
If they were after the quick buck then they would definitely do this. Also, if you're working for a company who's only purpose is to copy other companies, you should realize it's all about money...
They are bullies and have a superiority complex boasting about their capacity to execute. They do not have a monopoly on execution. That's a farce.
They are greedy, selfish and generally think only of themselves. Not the consumers they serve, the local markets or their employees.
I have witnessed them come into markets, destroy the lives and dreams of entrepreneurs and employees in emerging markets and shut down abruptly.
Finally, this operation (thier ecommerce operations in particular) is a house of cards. Service quality sucks, customers are lied to and they engage in an epic waste of money
It is impossible to build online retail operations in 1-2 years. Yet this is their objective. Build fluff and sell to some unsuspecting corporate development team.
The problems groupon is facing is inextricably linked to the involvement of the samwers as far as I'm concerned. Elsewhere, flash sales and couponing operations do well. Anything these guys touch is ultimately unsustainable and fluff. Now they want to try online retail with its logistics, warehousing, etc in emerging markets without a long term horizon. Ha! In a few years time you will realize how stupid the praise in this article is.
http://e27.sg/2012/09/10/is-rocket-internet-losing-its-grip-...
http://sgentrepreneurs.com/2012/09/05/is-there-any-method-in...