Review: Groupon

Recently I had the opportunity to use $50 Groupon credit on something and report back to you guys. So here's how my experience went down...

The site is pretty overwhelming at first. There's a lot of deals for things like teeth whitening, weekends away, fancy dinners, LED lights... just a ridiculous amount of stuff. Once I signed up, I would get three emails a day - one for shopping deals, one for Perth deals, and one for getaway deals - but I think you can tailor the emails so you only get alerts for the categories you're interested in. And the coupon page makes it quite easy to see all the deals at once, too.

So after a couple of weeks I finally got my coupon sorted. Aidan and I don't really go out to dinner all that often - well, unless you count all the sneaky trips to Nandos - so I thought it might be fun to go out somewhere new. I ended up picking a voucher for an Indian restaurant in Scarborough called Spicy Nights.


Now, as for the voucher itself, I have to say that the savings would be pretty incredible. For $39, we got a tasting plate of entrees, a main each, and naan bread and rice. I think the average for one main would be about $25, so it was definitely worth using the voucher! The only extra thing we paid for was $8 corkage.

And as for the food... oh man. I didn't want to be "that guy" who has an SLR camera out when people are eating, so I just took some sneaky phone shots. So for the appetisers we had chicken tikka, vegetable samosas and tandoori prawns (we swapped the lamb in the entrees for extra chicken), then we got a beef masala curry and good ol' butter chicken, with garlic naan. THEN for dessert we had this weirdly delicious condensed milk-inside-donut-batter kind of dish (it just tasted like a warm donut with syrup, yum) and some pistachio ice-cream. Which is all included in the deal.


I was a little reluctant to try Groupon because I didn't want to be one of those 'extreme couponer' people, but there's actually quite a big range of deals. To be honest, most of the shopping deals didn't really interest me - lots of Swarovski diamonte pendants, genie bras, that kind of thing. The holiday ones are pretty great, but I guess you'd have to be pretty flexible on where you wanted to go.

I doubt I'll use it regularly, but I do think the local deals are worth checking out. I thought that most of them, especially the food deals, would have a million terms and conditions like "Can only be used between 4:30 and 5:15pm", or "Deal  is only valid for next two days", or "You have absolutely no say in what you order", but all the ones I checked out seemed pretty reasonable. I don't think there would be many big name restaurants on the list, but if you don't mind giving somewhere new a go, I'd definitely recommend it.

Have you guys used Groupon or any of those other deal sites before?

{Groupon kindly sent me a $50 voucher to use on their site, but all thoughts and opinions are, as always, my own.}