GroupOn In India

GroupOn - the company that's worth over $5 billion started as a simple Wordpress powered blog. The company has began expanding and has acquired a 3.5 month old startup based out of Kolkata, called 'SoSasta'. The founder of GroupOn Andrew Mason says -
<blockquote>“All we did was we took a WordPress Blog and we skimmed it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post with the points embedded. It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We’d say in the right up, ‘This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large. If you want a different color or size, email that to us.’ We didn’t have a form to add that stuff. We were just, it was so cobbled together. It was enough to prove the concept and show that it was something that people really liked. The actual coupon generation that we were doing was all FileMaker. We would run a script that would email the coupon PDF to people. It got to the point where we’d sell 500 sushi coupons in a day and we’d send 500 PDFs to people with Apple Mail at the same time. Really the first, until July of the first year was just a scrambling to grab the tiger by the tail. It was trying to catch up and reasonable piece together a product.”</blockquote>
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Groupon India

Using the principles of collective buying, Groupon negotiates unprecedented discounts with popular businesses and shares them with subscribers via free daily emails. The deals are activated only when a minimum number of people agree to buy, encouraging subscribers to share the promotion with family and friends. By guaranteeing a large number of new customers, Groupon has created a powerful new marketing vehicle for local merchants in thousands of cities worldwide. This innovative approach to e-commerce has brought millions of dollars in new revenue to local businesses while saving more than $1.5 billion for consumers around the world.

I have my own doubts about success of GrouOn in India. Indian consumer is still averse to using Credit Cards online and buying products over the phone may take several months to be popular in India. What's your take on Groupon's acquisition of SoSasta?