By Catherine Maley, MBA

Thanks to popular coupon discount sites such as Groupon, LivingSocial, LivingFrugal, and CouponMom, today’s consumers are being handed a very easy, online-driven way to quickly become price shoppers for almost any product or service you can imagine—including, for better or worse, aesthetic products and services.

Using these sites and their coupon-oriented systems, consumers can obtain price deals on just about everything—meals, massages, hairstyling, helicopter rides, etc. You name it, and there’s a coupon for it.

Although the process works differently for the various discounted "deal of the day" coupon sites, the end result is more or less the same. Some offer straight coupons that a consumer can print at their computer and bring with them to your place of business to get the discount. Other sites, such as Groupon, actually market your services, collect the money, and split the revenues with you.

What happens when these new "frugal friends" expect your aesthetic practice to also provide discounts just to get to know you? This overall trend is here to stay for the foreseeable future, so how are you going to deal with it?

More.

[Source: PSP]