Deals sites such as Groupon or LivingSocial have been all the rage the past few months. Obviously, Groupon has made waves with all the buzz about a purported $6 billion acquisition by Google, but LivingSocial isn’t exactly chump change with its recent valuation at about $1 billion.
However, as big as these two sites are, they represent only a part of the greater online deals industry. Many more coupon and deal sites have sprung up in the past few years, no doubt there to capitalize on the declining economy and peoples’ greater desire to save money. One site that has risen a bit above the others is Los Angeles-based Savings.com.
Our compatriots over at socalTECH have posted an interview with Loren Bendele, CEO of Savings.com. Bendele’s company acts as more of a online coupon aggregator rather than act as a “deal of the day” purveyor. He’s quite aware that there are an overwhelming number of deal sites for consumers to wade through:
My favorite question when talking to consumers and friends, is how many deal sites do they subscribe to? Most people say they are on fifteen to twenty sites, but when you ask how many they read–it’s none of them. They’re just overloaded and overwhelmed by deals. We’re focused on making it easier for consumers to sift through all of the noise, and find the best deal on whatever you’re looking for. The way we do that, is you can come to our site, pick a particular category or merchant you like, and we have all of the deals available for that merchant or category ranked by popularity, and also by what the community thinks is the best deal. It gives you high confidence in finding the best deal, very quickly.
After checking out Savings.com for a bit, it’s quite apparent that they’ve spent some time making sure all of the offers still work. Oftentimes, one of the biggest challenges in deal shopping is finding coupons that actually work still. Making sure all the offers on their site still work is a huge gain for visitors. However, do any search on the site and you’ll still get pages and pages of hits. Although managing quantity is something they’re concentrating on, it’s still a big problem to tackle from the consumer’s point of view.
On deal industry consolidation:
I think there will be some consolidation, but I also think we’re in the early stages of this. It’s not like it’s a mature industry right now, and the only next step is consolidation and rollups. There’s lots of room for innovation, and there are new players coming out and doing interesting things. I think it’s a very exciting space to watch. There is so much demand from consumers, merchants are hungry for sales, and we’re all trying to understand how to manage deal and promotion strategy. I think there is room for innovation and new players entering the space, doing unique things. I think it will be tougher for people who are directly competing against what we are doing, however. That space is getting tougher, because it’s tougher to get exclusive deal content unless you have scale and volume, and without exclusive deals, it’s difficult to build scale and volume. That said, I think there will be innovative things from companies such as HauteLook, Rue La La, and other private sales folks. There’s still lots of room for innovation.
As a consumer, I’d love to visit just one site with all of the deals I could ever want. Having to manage multiple logins and visit ten or twenty sites consistently is just unreasonable. Bendele’s right in that it’s sort of a “Wild West” in the coupon/deal site space right now. Whichever site ends up being the “Amazon” of the deal world stands to win heavily from both a consumer and retailer partner point of view.
