Group Commerce, a daily-deals platform for media companies, has laid off 31 of its employees, or 28 percent of its 109-person workforce. The laid-off employees were located in six cities and were all in the local-services department, handling everything from sourcing deals for publishers to operations, according to Business Insider, which broke the news.
While New York-based Group Commerce will continue to seek offers from national brands, it will be stepping away from local deals. CEO Jonty Kelt said local offers didn’t yield enough rewards to justify the work, partly due to the fact that publishers became more proficient at sourcing their own local deals and relied less on Group Commerce.
The company will be rolling out a “lighter-touch way for publishers to get revenue streams from e-commerce” in a few months, according to Kelt.