The news this week, is that there is no daily deal related news. After spending 45 minutes trawling the net, trying to find something interesting to report about daily deals I've come to the conclusion that there is no decent daily deal news to report this week. Does this means the group buying industry is waning?
While daily deals aren't the flavour of the month like they were in boom time, they still have a long way to run. Ultimately some new business concept will come along to replace the group buying concept, but that could be 5 years away. Certainly the growth of mobile means that future disruptive business models are likely to be mobile based.
In the past 18 months we've seen dozens of kiwi deals sites shut down. We've also seen consolidation with bigger sites being sold and merged with others, such as Yazoom, Groupy and DailyDo all sharing the same deals and owner. Consolidation is a natural part of any business cycle. When every man and his dog tries to start a daily deals site with no planning, it's inevitable that most will close. In most markets there is only space for a few big players.
The lack of news this week extends to overseas. I just couldn't find anything! I was hoping to stumble across some new trend that international deal sites are using. Nothing to report really, except with last week's article where I mentioned that overseas sites are becoming long term deal platforms, not daily deal sites. That is pretty significant news, and it's a big shift for the industry.
This site has been running almost 5 years now. We've seen so many changes, so much growth, and then the hype died down to a plateau. Yet everyday, there are still great deals to be had. Unfortunately for merchants many deals mean they end up with a very small part of the pie. But for consumers, they still can find some super cheap deals.
It's a tough balance finding a business that is happy to discount their service, for the hope that customers will return and pay full price. There will always be deal hunters, but I think most people will return to a business if the service was amazing. It is still down to merchants offering the deals to wow the customer. And the end of the day, it's the business who takes the risk, they need to put the odds in their favour by winning every deal customer over. That's the whole point of marketing now, isn't it?
