July 30, 2010
By the ZippyCart Shopping Cart Reviews Content Team
Group buying has been extremely popular over the past year, as Groupon and a number of other sites have been competing for business among deal hunters. The way Groupon and other group buying sites work, is that each day subscribers are presented with a daily deal for the region they live, and they typically have 24 hours to purchase the deal. Recently group buying sites have been trying to further their technology, and improve the overall experience for subscribers and businesses. Groupon is looking to expand their efforts by moving into Personalized Deals, which is a new service they just debuted that will customize the daily deals that each Groupon subscriber receives. The Groupon interface will look the same, so subscribers just have to wait for the personalization to start to take effect.
Not only does Groupon have a heavy demand for businesses wanting to be featured online, they also have had a massive amount of requests from subscribers stating that they want more relevant and targeted daily deals. This is great news for businesses, as Groupon reported that they are only able to feature about one out of eight businesses that request to be featured. Now Groupon will be able to better accommodate the demand from businesses, by being able to spread out the deals to more targeted subscribers. This move sounds similar to the approach that Seattle based group buying site DealPop is taking, as they’re leveraging the data they have via WhitePages to provide the most relevant deals possible. As group buying expands into more markets, it is likely that the craze will continue as more subscribers get turned on to daily deals.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
Glad to see some new strides being made in this industry. I recently stumbled across a local (Houston-based) daily deals site that seems to be breaking the group buying mold a little.
http://getgrouby.com/houston
They’ve only got a minor following right now, but they are definitely innovating. I like the “choose the deal” feature.
This article about them seems to indicate that they plan on moving to real estate too. Group buying in the real estate market will definitely be a trend to watch.
http://www.auto-mobi.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46036&Itemid=50
Very interesting move on Groupon’s part, remains to be seen how good the personalization will be. To get deals they didn’t have access to directly, people could turn to a secondary daily deal exchange like lifesta.com, so they won’t feel like they missed out!