Reach more guests and drive revenue with our Groupon integration

Groupon helps you reach a large audience seeking deals, making it great for boosting ticket sales during slow periods and attracting new guests. The Groupon integration with ROLLER makes sure all Groupon tickets respect your venue’s capacity and schedule, allowing seamless redemption and tracking of Groupon revenue directly within ROLLER.

This guide shows you how to set up and use the Groupon integration with ROLLER.

What is Groupon?

Groupon is an online marketplace that offers their customers discounted deals on a variety of products and experiences. It connects businesses with potential guests by featuring limited-time offers, called "deals," at reduced prices.

Each deal is available for a specified time and often includes a significant discount, making it appealing to guests looking for bargains. You can use Groupon to reach a broad audience, attract new guests and increase sales, especially during slower periods.

For example, you could offer a discounted ticket deal on Groupon, allowing guests to purchase tickets at a special rate within a specific timeframe. Guests buy these deals on Groupon’s website or app, then redeem them directly at your venue on the scheduled date. This setup brings in more visitors and helps you boost your ticket sales.

What can you do

Integrating Groupon with ROLLER allows you to:

• List your products in ROLLER on the Groupon website/app.
• Manage capacity and pricing directly within ROLLER for Groupon bookings.
• Schedule availability for specific ticket types in ROLLER, automatically reflected on Groupon.
• Redeem Groupon tickets at POS using the same process as other ROLLER bookings.
• Track Groupon sales and revenue within your ROLLER Analytics and ROLLER reports.
• Sync sales updates automatically between ROLLER and Groupon (may take up to an hour to update).

Supported ROLLER product types and features

Groupon products are configured as regular products in ROLLER with a few additional settings. Currently, the product types and features are:

Product descriptions and images are not supported through ROLLER. These must be added directly in the Groupon portal.

Getting started with Groupon

You must have an account with Groupon to get started with this integration. 

You must first:

1. Decide what ROLLER products you want to sell through Groupon.
2. Negotiate a contract with Groupon to sell the product's ticket variations at defined prices.

Once you have completed the above steps, it's time to set up your Groupon products in ROLLER.

Step 1: Create Groupon products in ROLLER

Set up your Groupon offerings as session or standard pass products in ROLLER, including ticket variations, prices and availability.

1. From Venue Manager, go to Products > Create product.
2. Select a new session or standard pass for your Groupon offer.
3. Configure the product with variations, prices and availability.
   
   If you are a HQ venue, you can create Groupon offers as HQ products and then add them to individual managed venues as you do with other products. 
   
   
4. Set each ticket variation to be tax inclusive. Groupon requires that your ticket prices include all taxes. You must do this in each ticket's advanced options.
   
   
   • In the product settings, select the ticket variation.
   • Select Advanced options (1) to reveal the ticket's tax settings. 
   • Select Tax override (2), then select Tax inclusive (3), for the tax rate you want. View the standard pass example below. You won't be able to select Item is sold on Groupon (see the step below) until you configure the ticket price to be tax inclusive. 
     
     

Step 2: Configure Groupon specific ticket variation settings

1. In the session or standard price product, select the ticket variation.
2. Select the advanced options.
3. Select Groupon >  Item is sold on Groupon. You won't be able to select this option until the ticket type is configured as tax inclusive (Groupon requirement). Refer to the above section for details.
4. Complete the following mandatory fields from Groupon products:

• • Sale price – The price the item is sold for in Groupon
  • Original price – The value of the item before the Groupon discount. This shows as a strikethrough price on the Groupon checkout.
  • Merchant price – The amount you receive off the sale price. If you don't have this set up correctly as per your agreement with Groupon it will negatively impact your reporting. 

Step 3: ROLLER and Groupon product mapping

ROLLER product IDs need to be shared with Groupon for products linked to your deals.

Find these in Venue Manager > Settings > Integrations > Groupon.

Step 4: Additional configuration

• Disable date selection (standard pass only): This removes the calendar on the Groupon checkout for standard pass products. When selected, Groupon creates bookings with a booking date for the day of the transaction, and should be used for passes that are valid for a date range from purchase date.
• Report Groupon merchant price as revenue: This will use the Groupon merchant price (the value paid to you rather than the value paid by the guest) as the revenue value reported in ROLLER.  

Modify products being sold through Groupon

Once your products are live on Groupon, any modifications to the product name, pricing and availability in ROLLER may take up to one hour or more to sync through to Groupon.

Guest view on Groupon checkout

The ROLLER fields and settings that are displayed on the Groupon checkout are:

• Ticket names and prices (not product name; this is configured in Groupon)
• Groupon specific settings
• Available dates/times

When a Groupon deal is purchased, the guest will receive a confirmation email from Groupon which contains their ROLLER booking ID. This can be scanned or typed into the ROLLER POS search field to locate and redeem the booking on entry to your venue.

Redeem Groupon bookings at POS

Groupon bookings appear like any other booking in ROLLER, with guest details and associated tickets that have been purchased.

Staff can redeem bookings made on Groupon at POS as per any normal booking. Optional features such as assigning waivers and adding additional items to bookings can also be performed on Groupon bookings in ROLLER POS.

Redeem standard passes

Standard passes sold on Groupon can also be checked in as per any normal booking. However if the pass is being used as a voucher, then you will need to have a method to allocate a session time to guests in order to manage capacity.

For example, you could create a $0 Groupon voucher product (session type product) where you can select a session time, then complete the booking without payment in order to allocate the guests to a specific session time. 

Report on Groupon sales

Since Groupon sales create bookings in ROLLER, they will appear on your regular ROLLER reports.

There are some important differences in how Groupon sales report compared to regular ROLLER bookings, which are outlined below.

Groupon tender type

Groupon sales will have a transaction against them using the Voucher tender type, rather than Credit Card. This is because the transaction has not been processed via your payment provider.

Reports which have a Payment Type filter will allow you to filter specifically for these transactions.

Other deferred revenue

Bookings created in ROLLER from Groupon sales will generate deferred revenue. This deferred revenue is separated from your regular deferred revenue and gift card deferred revenue, into an "other deferred revenue" field. This field appears as a column on the Revenue recognition Report. 

As per regular deferred revenue, this other deferred revenue will be shifted over to recognized revenue when the booking is redeemed or expired, along with any associated tax included in the Groupon product.

Reporting on Groupon sales

The best way to report on the sales and revenue generated from Groupon products is to use the Detailed product sales report. This report allows you to filter specifically to Groupon products.

Tax inclusive on Groupon ticket sales

If tax is applied to a Groupon ticket, the sale price for tickets in Groupon will always be tax-inclusive, regardless of your venue's default tax setting.

To enable this, you must configure each ticket’s tax settings individually in the advanced options, as this cannot be set at the product level. You won't be able to set up the integration without setting each Groupon product ticket variation to tax inclusive in ROLLER. Refer to the section above to see how to do this.

For example, if you set a $10 Groupon ticket with a 5% tax rate, the $10 price will include tax, with the 5% tax deducted from this amount.