BizSugar.com › Marketing › Google Offers Takes on Groupon

For a while now, Google had built-in support for merchants to offer coupons through Google Places (their profile/directory service) – a self-serve model where the merchant creates their own offer and uses Google simply to syndicate. But this is changing in a potentially big way. For now, the change is mainly in branding – changing “coupons” to “Google Offers” – but the expectation is that this will soon be the basis for a more substantial offer service with a group-buy/tipping-point model that would allow it to compete directly with Groupon