Telstra launches group buying site Yellow Pages Offers
Telstra’s advertising and directories arm Sensis is the latest to jump into the group buying space with the launch of Yellow Pages Offers, Mumbrella can reveal.
Although the site has not been officially announced, a soft launch has already taken place with offers for Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
The space is a competitive one, with most of Australia’s major online publishers investing in some kind of group buying play.
NineMSN has Cudo; Yahoo!7 bought Spreets; Amazon backs Living Social and Jump On it; and News Ltd and Network Ten are both investors in Our Deal. Meanwhile ScoopOn is involved in a legal tussle with GroupOn which is about to launch in Australia as Stardeals.
Today saw The Australian’s new financial columnist Nabila Ahmed take Telstra to task over its lack of a group buying site. She writes of Telstra: “Particularly worrying is its inability to develop a group buying business — such as Spreets or Cudo — when the core client base is the same small-to-medium businesses that populate YellowPages.”
In a statement to Mumbrella, Simon Betschel, group manager of Yellow Pages online and mobile said: “Sensis continues to look at new ways to broaden our offerings to our customers as we respond to the emerging digital needs of the SME market. The Yellow Pages Offers site supports the focus of our team which includes making it easy for small businesses to find more customers online and capitalise on opportunities in the digital world.
“Today, with the explosion of advertising channels via technology and the popularity of digital devices, Yellow Pages offers small businesses a growing range of marketing solutions across print, online, voice and mobile services, search engines and online mapping sites, new devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android devices and Telstra’s T-Hub, and satellite navigation devices, to help deliver more customers through their doors.”
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this has been live for the past 3 weeks. ‘Soft’ launch is right – so soft no one is taking up the offers.
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Telstra jump on a bandwagon? Who would of thought…
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I am taking bets on how long it will be til Gerry Harvey complains about group discount programs
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hahaha @ Daniel
The guy is a dinosaur!
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@Daniel Gerry who?
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Potentially insulting deal today in Sydney from Yellow. “Valentine’s Day gift idea – IPL hair removal”.
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“when the core client base is the same small-to-medium businesses that populate YellowPages”
The real target is the consumer not the sme?
There isn’t much point having volumes of inventory without an audience?
most of the local group buying sites launched through developing and then selling to their social network groups such as Jumponit’s ‘I love sydney’ group, now over 150,000 strong.
I also get the feeling yellow pages brand isn’t all that appealing to the target market.
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Great – another one. Is that 37 sites now active in the Sydney market? FFS…
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Telstra offers – double the prices of your nearest competitors and no-one available to help when the deals aren’t honoured!
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Its a good idea, suits them.
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I know for a fact that this same model has been pitched to Sensis / Pacific Access / Yellow Pages by both internal staff and externals for over 15 years – They just got it love now? Totally Yellow Pages speed -too little too late
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@shaun
I disagree, YellowPages is a household brand name with huge potential to attract a wider market.
The problem I see with this is their failure to provide a point of difference. Clearly they have a model which has cleary been proven to work, how do they manage to make it fail? Their offers are just as good as what you see on your more popular group buy sites.
I ask myself why would I buy from YellowPages Offers? Maybe they need to answer this question with a WOW factor. How? I’m sure their budgets are large enough to have that question answered.
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KGB , a similar directory company, has been pretty successful in the UK . I guess they have the existing SME relationships, sales force and customer service to support it.
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