With Black Friday around the corner, American Express is offering $25 to card members for supporting any local business on November 26th (Amex’s Small Business Saturday). It is a perfect way to spend what cash you might have left after your online Black Friday shopping blitz to treat yourself to something from your favorite local business. Note that the business does NOT have to be retail, so feel free to get $25 off dinner, a spa treatment, or anything else small and local. As an added bonus, grab a local deal from our DistrictList and boost your savings!
An Eye Opening Perspective Into the Inner Workings of Groupon
An eye opening perspective into the inner workings of Groupon, Andrew Mason, and its management, just days before its highly anticipated IPO. (Business Insider)
Nothing Good Happens After…
Ron Feldman mentioned this great New York Times article the other day and it conjured up some thoughts about impulse buying and deal fatigue. First off, I’m ashamed to own up to buying five car wash deals in 2 months (for a car that’s 9 years old and has a 6 month protective film of dirt on it). The lighter take away from this article is that you can just as easily impulse buy online (especially when browsing deals) and the later it gets in the day, the more likely you are to buy those last-minute-checkout-line-equivalent deals that you probably don’t need. Don’t tell your kids this, but your wallet is statistically looser later in the day and late into the night. Save some cash, hide your wallet at night because nothing good happens after 2AM?
I’m biased, but I think that DistrictFinds is a great way handle the daily deal bombardment. Sure there is a lot of deals out there causing fatigue, but we have built DistrictFinds to better isolate the deals that you want. Take a look at some of the following features we initially rolled out with:
- Take a look at DistrictFinds main deal page and you’ll see that the deals are divided by new deals (that came out today) and active deals (yesterday’s and older).
- Your daily email will only highlight today’s new deals.
- You can configure what categories are delivered to your inbox.
- You have the ability to sort your deals by Newest, Closest to You, and Greatest Savings. The ‘Closest to You‘ feature is pretty cool because it will look up your current location or base it on a zipcode that you enter. You can even see them in relation to you on a map.
Google Aggregating Daily Deals in China & the Whole Foods Deal
Google fired off another Daily Deal shot this week with the launch of their China aggregator, Shihui. While it seems quick for any of this to be the fruits of the DealMap’s acquisition, it is a great move to infiltrate and stake a presence in the largely untapped China market.
This week’s $10 for $20 Whole Foods deal gathered some serious attention this week. A Forbes article details the value of the deal for Whole Foods. The article noted that with a cap of 1 million coupons, they were selling at 115,000 per hour at its peak. If you missed this one, keep your eyes on the DistrictFinds Daily Digest as this is not the first time Whole Foods has offered this type of coupon (Whole Foods has offered coupons in select regions, not nationally).
Google Buys Zagat – Expands Local Presence
If at first you don’t succeed (in buying Groupon and Yelp), buy (Dealmap), buy (Zagat) again. We are witnessing Google’s piecemeal approach to carve out a tremendous chunk of the fledgling local market. Google’s surprise acquisition of Zagat yesterday helps round out the ultimate Yelp competitor and further solidifies their stake in local. Yelp’s recent shift to contextual deals (from the typical Daily Deal offering) is Google’s potential blueprint for local. Google can unleash the ultimate local platform providing reviews, deals, and purchasing for local businesses when you search online or from your smartphone. Now might be a good time for the other players (Yelp+Groupon+Bing?) to start teaming up.
Facebook and Yelp Leaving Daily Deals Space – What They Did Right
Facebook and Yelp are exiting the Daily Deal space. Facebook issued a statement last Friday saying that they are ‘done dealing with deals’ which was followed by Yelp’s late Monday announcement that they are scaling back their deal service. While Yelp stated that they are still in game, they are reducing their Daily Deals staff and focusing bringing on higher quality deals.
These were short runs for both companies. Facebook Deals closed down after four months and Yelp has reduced their effort shortly after its first anniversary of its launch. I think these were great ‘experiments’ for both companies. Take a look at their similarities and it becomes clear that they were both augmenting their impressive user bases to dabble in the space. With IPO’s both on the horizon for Facebook and Yelp, these Daily Deals experiments had to prove profitable or be shown the door. They could have also been victims of the massive noise in the space. Mix that in with a late entry of the market and you are now relegated to being another deal site who is NOT Groupon or LivingSocial.
Facebook and Yelp did do some things right with their deal offerings. The Yelp Deals pilot ran like every other deal: provide users with a one-off deal negotiated by their sales team for a limited time. They eventually made a shift in their deal offering by negotiating everyday deals that did not have tipping points or countdown clocks and were relevant to the businesses that users were searching for. You can browse a list of active deals in your neighborhood or see an applicable deal if you are checking out reviews for a new restaurant.
Yelp Deals inside a business page.
Facebook Deals consisted of a mix of self-negotiated and third-party offers. This was a great vehicle to deliver deals from some of your favorite deal sites and allow you to pay with a ‘unified wallet.’ Once your credit card or PayPal account is verified, you can go click happy and purchase deals without ever having to enter your purchase credentials again. I don’t think that I ever saw deals from Groupon or LivingSocial, so I’m wondering if they had them onboard, would they have been more successful. Also, Facebook’s Check-in deals will still be maintained (anybody see the Yelp/Facebook similarity here? I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Facebook absorb Yelp).
Use your Facebook account to purchase deals.
Are Facebook and Yelp setting a Daily Deal trend? In an effort to cut through the noise, they are better augmenting their core business models with coupons as opposed to slapping on deals for the sake of. They are doing a great job sticking to the plan: Cut the fat; Consolidate brand; IPO. Bravo.
Email Blunder Welcome
I just wanted to drop a quick note regarding the email blunder that went out this morning (8/30/11) to our East Coast (and some Central region) users. With any growth, come growing pains of varying proportions. DistrictFinds has obviously proven that we are no exception to that with today’s fine email multiplication demonstration. In short, we hit it a point where our old email system was not able to sustain timely delivery of the morning DistrictLists to all of our users. We made some upgrades over the weekend and had a bug slip through that allowed incomplete emails to be sent multiple times to users. I just wanted to apologize if this caused any frustration to our users and to assure that we have taken measures to prevent any future blunders of this sort. We know that privacy is important to everyone and intend to uphold our privacy and anti-spam policies.
On a lighter note, albeit not how we intended to introduce ourselves, welcome to the DistrictFinds blog! We have been overwhelmed by the support and interest in DistrictFinds since our inception this March. While we are one of the newer players in the daily deal space, DistrictFinds has been lucky enough to carve out a niche among other daily deal legends like Yipit.com and TheDealMap.com. We strive to bring our users the best wallet-fattening deals around and are excited about where we plan on taking DistrictFinds (as long it’s no more than one email a day). We love to hear how we can make DistrictFinds better, so keep the comments rolling.
Thanks for reading,
Steve Au
DistrictFinds CEO & Founder