Rocket-Backed Coupon Site Partners With Daily Mail

Rocket Internet backed Global Savings Group is partnering with the Daily Mail tabloid, bringing its discount-coupon service into the U.K in time for Black Friday and the Christmas shopping period, according to Bloomberg. The service will this month start its offerings on the website of Daily Mail and General Trust Plc’s flagship newspaper, Global Chief Operations Officer Johannes Wirth said Friday in a phone interview.

“Most publishing houses have a hard time monetizing their traffic, and we offer them an additional source of income“ through revenue-sharing or fixed payments, Wirth said. “We’re expecting Black Friday and the upcoming Christmas shopping to drive sales and want to become the leading discount-code platform in the U.K. in the next months.“ Global Savings links shoppers with free coupons and discounts for about 19,000 online retailers such as Amazon, Zalando and Asos. It gets a fee of 5 percent to 15 percent of the value of a shopper’s purchase, Wirth said.

The company is confident it will break even this year, Managing Director Andreas Fruth said in the same interview. The company, which is active in more than 20 countries including Germany, India and France, competes with the likes of RetailMeNot and CouponDunia. Global Savings and its rivals are rushing to build scale as e-commerce increasingly replaces brick-and-mortar shops in many retail sectors.

Rocket Internet owns about 40 percent of the startup. Started about four years ago, Global Savings helped generate 232 million euros in gross merchandise volume in 2015 and wants to about double that this year, Fruth said. Investors in the company also include Deutsche Telekom and Holtzbrinck Ventures.