For well over a year now, niche daily deal sites have been gaining importance and becoming major players in the daily deals scene.
Such is the importance of these sites that some trends such as convergence (previously limited to larger main stream sites only) are starting to show in this segment. A few examples are the recent acquisition of MyPetHabit.com a pet daily deals site by competitor Coupaw. Combined, both companies have become a major player not only in the group buying world, but also in pet related e-commerce. Other recent acquisitions include daily deals for moms Plum District’s purchase of Doodle Deals, another group buying site aimed at this particular niche and Chatterfly, a mobile loyalty platform that will allow the site to go mobile and develop loyalty strategies for its merchant partners.
So as the niche-oriented market matures, and new sites aimed exclusively at certain targets burst, competition gets tougher and consumers of these segments begin to experiment the same problems main-stream daily deals users have been suffering for a while now: they get more offers than they can handle, their inboxes become crowded with mails from these sites and finding a good bargain becomes increasingly difficult and time-consuming. There’s now wondering, then, that niche oriented daily deals aggregators are being launched.
Over the past couple of years big players at the daily deals industry have been embarked on a massive expansion process.
At first, this expansion focused on reaching new markets throughout the world. Daily Deal companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial spent millions in acquisitions of leading sites across the world as a strategy to rapidly reach new markets leveraging local teams and relations with merchants.
But now that big players have consolidated their presence across the world time has come for a different kind of growth: product improvement.
By improving their product, large daily deal sites can produce true differentials that could set them apart from their competitors, both the global companies and the local smaller startups. This is becoming essential as companies, regardless of their size, all offer pretty much the same features and deals of similar quality, and daily deals have become pretty much a commodity. Today, the biggest difference between Groupon and a smaller local competitor lies in that Groupon is a global company which perhaps offers more deals every day at that given market, but when it comes to user experience there’s really no big difference.
Time has come for that to change. Or at least that seems to be the plan for Groupon, Peixe Urbano and other industry heavy weights.
DealFind, one of North America’s fastest growing and largest daily deal sites came up with a new feature that allows its users to get huge (and that means HUGE) discounts of 85-90% on luxury items such as clothing, accessories, gadgets and other goods.
“Dream Deals” (the name given to these new kind of deals) is not a new section on the site, but rather a surprise deal that suddenly appears on the site and vanishes as soon as it runs out. The stock of available products is really scarce, so users know they must really hurry and buy at once if they wish to obtain the deal.
These are not regular deals, and they are not available every day, so it’s impossible for users to know exactly when they will show up. As they are not included in the daily email, it is also impossible for users to track them unless they follow DealFind on Twitter or Facebook or by constantly visiting (or continuously refreshing) DealFind’s site.
Today, thousands of sites throughout the web are protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) a bill introduced at the US House of Representatives and the Protect Intellecutual Property Act (PIPA), a bill being considered by the US Senate.
If approved, SOPA would basically allow the Attorney General to shut down any foreign website (foreign to the US) that facilitates Copyright infringement. As Mashable’s Chris Heald mentions in a post published today, this is tremendously easy (as easy as having a comments section in your site where one of your users could post a link to some copyrighted material). But that’s not all, as the site owner you become liable for the Copyright infringement. As it is, SOPA considers that every violation is willful, so good luck defending yourself if the law passes.
Besides, a court order would force search engines to eliminate your site from their listings, ISPs to block access to your site and payment platforms such as PayPal not to do business with you. It would be Wikileaks all over again. Only this time it would be massive.
This is how far the bill goes for foreign sites. But what about American sites?
If your site is American or aimed mostly at the American public, things can also get bad for you. All it takes is a Qualifying Plaintiff, meaning a person or company who possesses legal rights over intellectual property, to point your site as a Copyright violator, or as a vehicle designed or enable to infringe copyright which would make it liable under section 501 or 1201 of title 17 of the United States Code.
We figured a good way to start the new year would be doing a recap of what we achieved throughout 2011 and setting our resolutions for 2012.
Pinggers was born in late November, 2010, so we could argue that 2011 was really our first year as a company. And boy, it was some year.
We started 2011 in a new office, a small but cozy space in a 25th floor over Buenos Aires from which we can clearly see the Uruguayan shore. It was at this office that we built most of our product and finally launched Pinggers, the first daily deals aggregator to provide true personalization to its users, providing each a fully unique experience.
But that meant we had to build and set up our Artificial Intelligence Core. Our classifier identifies the category and two subcategory levels of each deal. Having it work correctly took loads of time and efforts, but we finally managed to have it work with over a 95% success rate. But that’s not it. Our recommendations engine learns the tastes and preferences of each of our users and provides a fully personalized deals feed. Setting that up was the real challenge.
With so much talking around the daily deals scene it becomes hard to realize how attractive this new market really is.
As every hot new market, daily deals have certainly raised a huge amount of attention. Stories ranging from Groupon’s awesome business model to Groupon’s failure in making profit, and blogposts about how Groupon is great for your business to comments by merchants who feel Groupon has ruined them have emerged all over the press and the blogosphere, generating all sorts of mixed feelings among enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, journalists and investors.
It is no news that daily deals are a very dynamic market, with new players popping in every day and others being bought by competitors at the same pace. This happens both for smaller sites, which find the best way to grow is by acquiring or merging with a smaller or same-sized competitor in another town (as DescuentoLibre, which bought LA’s based Groupacho; and CityPockets which boght DealBurner) and for bigger companies, which also grow by either buying out other sites (as the Gilt Groupe which recently acquired BuyWithMe) or by raising huge investments.
LivingSocial is known for more than just being Groupon’s toughest competitor. The Washingon DC based company has been setting the pace when it comes to innovation and has managed to pull off some truly impressive deals which beat amazing records.
In January, 2011 the daily deals site offered a $20 Amazon gift card for only $10 that sold over 1,1 Million deals. For Black Friday, the Washington DC company sold over 330,000 coupons on national deals held alongside companies such as OfficeMax, Electronic Arts and Snapfish.
Yesterday, LivingSocial launched a new massive national deal. This time, the company partnered with McDonald’s in order to offer “One Booklet with Five Individual Big Mac Vouchers and Five Vouchers for Large Fries” for U$13 (50% Off). In its first 24 hours, the deal sold a little over 200,000 deals. This is an impressive performance. However, is it possible that LivingSocial and McDonald’s were aiming at higher sells and upper virality levels? Maybe so. In a press release both companies issued on Wednesday, November 30th, this deal was announced as the largest-ever national fast food deal in the history of Group Buying (and McDonald’s first).
Today we feel we have reached a new milestone. Pinggers’ first mobile application is finally out and available for download on Apple’s AppStore (click here to download it).
As Pinggers’ web version, the iPhone app allows users to access their fully personalized daily deals feed, which constantly learns each user’s tastes and preferences through their actions and through “Like” and “Dislike” buttons near each deal which strongly improve the way recommendations work.
Besides, this new App also has a new feature called Nearby Deals which uses geolocation to determine the user’s position and displays deals in his or her whereabouts in a map in a very intuitive manner. To view deals, users must simply tap on the pins shown on the map, or swipe through deals at the top of the screen. It’s that easy.
Google Offers is expanding, that is an undeniable fact. Not only the site is regularly expanding to new markets, but now a huge amount of deals will also be made available.
Last week, Google Offers site signed an agreement with sixteen daily deal sites which will be selling some of their deals over Google’s site. These new partners are mostly niche sites like DoodleDeals, GiltCity, GolfNow, HomeRun, Juiceinthecity, MamaPedia, PopSugarShop, ReachDeals, Zozi.com, Schwaggle and Active.com and a few mainstream sites such as Tippr and kgbDeals.
This strategy resembles Facebook’s approach to daily deals. When it launched its deals service in April, 2011, the social network partnered with several sites such as OpenTable and Zozi.com, which provided deals (most times not exclusive deals that could be also found in their own sites) that were also made available for Facebook’s users who could purchase directly from the social network.
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has announced that today it will become the newest red giant (or will it be a white dwarf?) in the daily deals galaxy.
As from today Bing will be offering its users a brand new daily deals aggregator that, according to the site’s blog, will include deals from Groupon, LivingSocial and roughly 200 daily deals sites in the US, plus other kinds of discounts and offers from shopping sites across the country.
The aggregator is mostly visual as it contains a sliding bar where deals are displayed with a large picture, price, discount level and their title in a very clean way. Oddly enough, this bar also contains some adds the same size the deals are.
At the bottom, users can browse through the most popular online stores and sites and, beneath that bar, deals can be chosen by category.
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