7th
What’s next for Daily Deals?
Yesterday Groupon pulled its IPO until they can get their shit figured out. I can’t help but think that an entire market thousands of entrepreneurs, dozens and VCs have spent millions of hours and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing Groupon.
Consumers, merchants and deals companies all have benefited from the growth of Daily Deals. However, it seems that we’ve gotten too much of a good thing. Merchants are offering less attractive deals so they don’t lose money, consumers are buying deals less because they aren’t as good, and deals companies are re-evaluating how to approach the market.
This has been written about extensively. But whats next?
Mobile - Groupon, LivingSocial, and BuyWithMe have all stated that mobile is their next frontier. However, it doesn’t feel to me that anyone has done a great job with mobile or real-time deals yet.
POS - Closing the loop is the holy grail, and many companies are vying to be at the merchant’s payment terminal. LivingSocial has gone as far as to give merchants special POS systems to redeem deals.
Socializing deals - Making plans around or a deal or meeting other people around a deal has been tried by ScoopSt and LivingSocial. This strategy has not been scaled successfully yet, but certainly could bring users back to a deals site on an ongoing basis.
After the coming shakeout in the Daily Deals space we will see another wave of innovation around daily deals. However, that innovation will not be around making deals cheaper, but making deals more discoverable and useful to the consumer, and being more helpful to businesses than just enticing a customer to walk through the doors for steep discounts.
