Groupon enters e-commerce industry, challenging Amazon in U.K.

Groupon, the online site for daily deals, recently started offering discounts on products sold online in the U.K., with cost savings up to 80 percent. After the deals are purchased, the customer enters a code on the manufacturer's website to receive the discount on the online order. This move into the e-commerce industry puts Groupon in direct competition with online retail giants such as Amazon and eBay.

Originally, Groupon offered deals on local restaurants, hotels and merchants. But with the addition of vouchers for e-commerce sites, Groupon could start attracting consumers who would normally seek out products on Amazon and Ebay, Bloomberg reported.

In an interview with the news source, Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corporation, said Groupon has an advantage over Amazon and eBay in its email list of more than 115 million subscribers it is allowed to contact daily with deals and promotions.

"There's $500 million to $1 billion in sales they could drive just because of the scale of their subscriber base," Wingo told the source.

In response to the growing popularity of daily deal sites, Google, which recently acquired Zagat, the ratings and review guidebooks on local restaurants, hotels and attractions, created its Google Offers feature earlier this year. While still very young, Google Offers grew 18 percent in August, while Groupon increased revenue by 13 percent for the month, CNET reported.