Coo: Local Deals Marketplace
Professional Services
Marketplace
CLIENT
Coo the App
CATEGORY
Professional Services
TIMEFRAME
6 Weeks
SERVICE
Product Strategy
Development
About Project
- 2,100 local businesses listed in the first year across four cities.
- Average merchant acquires 47 new customers a month through published deals.
- $29 flat monthly cost replacing coupon-book fees that ran into the hundreds.
- 310,000 deals redeemed in year one.
- 68% of redemptions came from customers who had never visited that business before.
- Built in 6 weeks.
Challenge & Solution
Challenge
Local businesses struggled to consistently attract new customers and lacked affordable digital channels to promote deals and increase community visibility.
Solution
We built a localized deals marketplace that enables merchants to publish targeted promotions and helps customers discover nearby offers easily. This improved merchant visibility and increased customer engagement through structured promotional workflows.
The client came out of local retail and had watched the same pattern for a decade. A small business gets a call from a daily deals company, sells a hundred vouchers at half price plus commission, serves a hundred people who never come back, and concludes that digital marketing does not work for them.
The alternatives were not much better. Printed coupon books cost hundreds per placement with no way to measure whether anyone used them. Social media required a person who had time to post, which a business with four employees does not have.
What the client wanted was blunt: a channel a hairdresser or a hardware shop could afford on a fixed monthly cost, that put a deal in front of people who live nearby, and that told the owner afterwards how many walked in. Discovery for the customer, measurement for the merchant, no commission on the transaction.
The 68% new-customer figure is what merchants renew on. It answers the objection the category created for itself, which is that deal platforms just discount your existing regulars.
Flat pricing turned out to be the harder sell up front and the reason retention held. Merchants who had been burned by commission models needed the maths explained once, and then stayed.
Expansion into two further metros is underway, with a merchant referral loop doing most of the acquisition.
A merchant dashboard for publishing and scheduling deals, with templates for the recurring cases: quiet Tuesday, end of season, new customer offer. Setting up a deal takes about three minutes, which is the constraint everything else was designed around.
Deals surface to customers by proximity and category, with a saved-deals wallet and reminders before expiry. Redemption runs on a code shown in store and confirmed by staff, so no integration with a point of sale is required.
Merchants see redemption counts, repeat versus new customer split, and which deal types perform in their category against anonymised local benchmarks.
Pricing is a flat monthly subscription with no commission, which was a deliberate structural choice rather than a pricing decision. Business profiles carry opening hours, photos and contact details, so a listing works even when no deal is running.
Typography & Color
