I had a friend recently who isn’t from the tech space and is the stereotypical female twenty something consumer that all online businesses are trying to reach me, ask me upon referring to “Daily Deals” what’s next? What is the new consumer-buying pattern that will hit the common “Joe or Jane” like an asteroid? After lots of thought into this new pattern of consumer buying, I think what’s next is very simply even more localized deals site.
After moving to South Bay area of Los Angeles, I could not find one local deal with either of the major daily deals sites i.e. Groupon, LivingSocial or Buywithme so this made me start opening my eyes and ears to localized deals sites that serve one area and work much closely with smaller businesses and this is where I found one of my favorite sites Cloops.
The first time I met the team from Cloops was at a local town fair and farmers market. They had a large bright colored stand up there at the fair and offered $5 in free Cloops dollars and I thought this was an amazing way to reach the local market and become a part of the community. They work with nearly every local restaurant and all the local activity places like surf shops, bicycle rental places, and various other local places.
All I am waiting for is for them to integrate with a Yelp or FourSquare so that I could get my location based daily deals while I walk down the street but I doubt this will ever happen as Yelp and Foursquare are more concerned with their present business models and would rather offer a deal directly instead of a small third party local deals site like Cloops.
In conclusion, I really believe over the next couple month’s you will start to see a lot of hyper local daily deals site pop up in your neighborhood as the industry starts to consolidate itself and people will start to stick with 1 or possibly 2 deals site altogether instead of signing for rapid deals everywhere.
They’re still is not a tool that I could find that can send me deals on things I like based on keyword alerts. That would be quite an awesome deal site in my opinion.
