San Francisco, Aug 9 (IANS): Chicago-based e-commerce marketplace Groupon has confirmed that it has laid off more than 500 of its employees -- 15 per cent of its 3,416-person headcount and is also planning to slash costs.

The reduction impacted workers in teams, including merchant development, sales, recruiting, engineering, product and marketing, TechCrunch reported on late Monday.

"Our overall business performance is not at the levels we anticipated and we are taking decisive actions to improve our trajectory," CEO Kedar Deshpande said in a statement provided to the website.

The chief executive says that the layoffs, as well as a reinvestment in marketing and initiatives that drive customer purchase frequency, will set the company up to generate positive cash flow by the end of 2022.

In a letter to staff, Deshpande said that Groupon is reducing its North America sales teams to focus on "self-service merchant acquisition capabilities".

It is also re-organising the company to focus "only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support".

"In addition, we are proposing to reduce cloud infrastructure and support functions as we wrap up cloud migrations," the CEO said.

Groupon is also closing its Australia Goods business, more than a decade after launching there in the first place. Finally, Groupon said that it will "rationalise" its real estate footprint to be more in line with hybrid work.