Groupon Inc 's

Our customers and merchants are at the center of our two-sided marketplace. The quality and stability of both our customers and merchants are key to our business model. We face competition on both sides of our marketplace.
We compete with other marketplaces, and some of our competitors have longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources. In addition, we compete with companies who address only specific verticals in the local experiences market, and in our Goods and Travel categories, companies who have greater scale and larger customer bases than we do. These factors may allow our competitors to benefit from their existing customer base with lower acquisition costs or to respond more quickly than we can to new or emerging technologies and changes in customer trends. These competitors may engage in more extensive research and development efforts, undertake more far-reaching marketing campaigns and adopt more aggressive pricing policies, which may allow them to build a larger subscriber base or to monetize that subscriber base more effectively than we do.
We also compete with companies that can offer alternative services for our merchants. There are companies that offer other types of advertising and promotional services to local businesses. Our merchants could choose to leverage these other platforms to attract customers to their businesses. We believe we can compete due to the access we provide our merchants to our large customer base, our trusted brand, and the investments we are making in self-service tools that will allow merchants to manage demand more effectively and better attract and retain customers.