Groupon Adds Scheduling Feature

Groupon has added the Groupon Scheduler to help merchants and customers keep track of deals.

Image: Groupon

Groupon is introducing a free service for merchants that could help quiet some of critics who have found their businesses deluged with deal-seeking client phone calls: the Groupon Scheduler.

The appointment scheduler allows customers to book appointments online, giving merchants a break from phone calls and emails as well as online tools to manage those bookings. It also provides customer appointment history, automatically sends email reminders to help cut down on the number of no-shows, and provides monthly data that can track increases in the number of appointments, new clients and gives a percentage of how full the appointment schedule is.

“We recognized that there were thousands of appointment-based Groupon merchants looking for a simple way to implement online scheduling,” David Katz, Groupon’s vice president and general manager of retail solutions wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Groupon was able to create the scheduler via technology it obtained through its September 2011 acquisition of OpenCal (which apparently slipped past the media), a two-year-old startup based in Vancouver, Canada, he said.

It will allow merchants to place a “Book Now” button on their website to let visitors schedule non-Groupon appointments too. (Which is probably compulsory: keeping a separate calendar for Groupon appointments sounds like a recipe for confusion.)

The addition ought to help merchants, but it could take business from companies such as Schedulicity or Genbook which saw a surge in business from merchants who need their online booking services to handle Groupon traffic.

Of course, there’s still the other daily deal businesses, like LivingSocial—which just scored $176 million in its latest round of funding—to work with. But since it is using that money to expand, the Washington, D.C.-based firm may be using that money to add services for merchants too.

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