Crazeal to become Groupon, finally!

One year after rechristening itself from the earlier avatar of SoSasta (after acquiring the local deals site), world's largest group buying company Groupon is all set to rebrand its India operations again. The firm, which changed its brand name in India to Crazeal, will soon move to a new domain groupon.co.in.

"Crazeal will be changing its name to Groupon very soon," said a mailer sent out to its subscribers.

When contacted by Techcircle.in, Groupon India head Ankur Warikoo responded via e-mail saying, "At this stage, we cannot speak about this because a formal announcement is pending (the note sent out to users mentions 'coming soon')."

Last year, when we asked Warikoo whether the firm would like to rebrand in line with the mother brand, he said, "That's a hard question to answer. People might credit the brand Groupon for some time but in the end, it is the best deal that they care about, whatever be the name. It's not a make-or-break situation. We want to be very cautious about that."

In another interaction with Techcircle.in, he had said, "Maybe some time in future, we will be able to rename ourselves as Groupon India."

Groupon had faced branding issues previously, along with the changes in the logo. It was entangled in a legal tussle with Bangalore-based ValueNet E-Commerce Pvt Ltd for the domain name Groupon.in. Groupon.in is currently a dead URL.

It is not clear though, whether the legal issue has been settled or not as Groupon has chosen to move to a different domain name. We also need to see if the firm will continue to use Crazeal as a consumer brand even as it shifts the domain name.

The company, however, seems to be growing fast and only recently, Warikoo told Techcircle.in Crazeal has been clocking 100 per cent quarter-on-quarter growth and has sold close to 6 lakh deal vouchers over the last year. He also claimed that Crazeal is now selling a voucher every 33 seconds, which essentially means it is selling over 2,600 vouchers on a daily basis. This is twice the number (1,200) quoted by Warikoo in June this year. The average ticket size of the deals has also increased and currently amounts to over Rs 1,300.

Watch this space for more updates on Groupon's India arm.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)