Groupon has secured a lot of attention in the least few weeks, as many small businesses struggle with being able to redeem the coupons.

Today’s Oregonian has a local take that blames abusive customers. Apparently, its a common practices to buy multiple coupons or try to pressure a business in accepting the same coupon repeatedly.

With any fairly new business model there are flaws that need to be fixed, but so far I haven’t seen Groupon acknowledge these flaws in a very public manner, nor have other similar  ie. competitive services, really differentiate themselves on abuse prevention.  There’s a huge communications and marketing hole here, and the first to fill it will end up being the leader in this space.