New group buying site DealMe: Unlike our competitors we pay on time
Deals Direct has entered the increasingly competitive group buying battle with the launch of DealMe – and accused other sites of taking too long to pass on cash to their vendors.
DealMe also follows a slightly different group buying model in that it does not require a minimum number of consumers to take up an offer, instead offering a total number of vouchers for each offer and a countdown until the deal expires.
Elisha Booth, DealMe’s head of marketing, said: “We talked to our vendors and one of the key learnings was the fact that some of the other group buying sites were tardy with payments to suppliers.
“This is beginning to be a major issue and so, in consultation with vendors, we came up with a fair system for all – 90% of payment in seven days, average commission of 20-30% and payment in full after 30 days.”
She also accused group buying sites of pressurising partners into making promises they cannot keep.
She said: “Another problem that is likely to surface for our competitors is an overselling of deals. We’ve foreseen this issue and we’ve dealt with it by capping our deals to ensure merchants don’t oversell.”
She added: “We know we’re stronger than most of our competitors in product sourcing and distribution.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Next up in news from the sector, the Group Aggregated Retailers Buying Organisation Secretariat (GARBOS) announced that the sector is now worth AUD176b, less discount, having signed up over million Australians.
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Another group buying site? Is it Tuesday already?
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I dealt with ScoopOn, Ouffer and Jump On It and had no issues with payments.
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really, another one!?
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I’ve been watching the group buying thing for some time and it’s interesting to see if the model is sustainable.
Groupon had it’s much publicised PR stuff up at the Superbowl though what was more interesting was the Groupon/Flowers Online fiasco.
Consumers were understandably peeved when they found out that normal FTD.com web visitors were getting lower base prices than people who had purchased a $20-for-$40 Groupon!
Apart from being a another PR problem it also sends warning signals about the sustainability of major discounting.
Groupon specials are money-losing propositions for merchants. The ROI that companies are looking for are the new customers that develop some brand loyalty. If Groupon members simply chase deal after deal the entire model starts to look a bit shaky.
And we haven’t even seen the ‘Google Offers’ and ‘Facebook Places’ location based deals arrive.
Given the size/potential our market vs the US and the ‘din’ already coming from the competing players …somethings got to give. I wonder how Yahoo 7 are feeling about the Spreets deal?
steve
http://www.stevemacalpine.com
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GroupOn shoulda taken the Google billions..
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I’ve had issues with Spreets but GrabOne has so far been a cheap blissful piece of cake to both buy and redeem. Haven’t tried the others yet.
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Entered the market? Their site has been around since November last year.
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Hi anon,
They’d argue they were in soft launch mode promoting only to their existing customers.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
They’ve been around for some time. It’s an interesting approach, they now also have a specific national deal and also focus on the entire state ( NSW, VIC, etc) rather than individual cities.
They will certainly pick up from targeting outside of the larger areas, eg, Sydney CBD, etc and their site has certainly improved from their previous version.
We’re actually aggregating their deals on Deal Pinch ( http://www.dealpinch.com ), along with over 20 other deal of the day websites.
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please Tim. enough with the group buying stories
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This is getting boring.
New group buying site shitsandgiggles.com promises “You can never have enough laser hair removal offers” and then cans rival CEO guy as a “real douchebag”.
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The daily emails I get from an aggregator site look more like spam these days – so many of the deals are borderline pathetic.
A ruler with penguins on it? A t-shirt with “DICKIES” on the front? An “Egyptian” hand towel for $14.95? Come on, there’s less tat down Paddy’s Markets – and for a better price.
As for the foreign holiday “deals” – it’s all very well giving a Wotif-style discount on a hotel room in Thailand, but if you’ve still got to pay Qantas $5,000 to get there and back, it’s hardly much of a “deal”, is it? I wonder at the take-up of those offers. I wonder, in fact, if many of them manage to generate a single click-through, let alone an actual expression of interest.
Can’t someone create an aggregator that only picks the best deal(s) of the day?
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@anon1, At http://www.dealpinch.com we see click throughs on every single item. People are curious.
By the way, for us to choose what you think is a good deal would be wrong. But we do categorize all of the deals in our system allowing you to choose if you want to know about cheap eats or fashionable frocks.
Today there are 45 deals for Sydney alone for you to pick and choose. Also, I don’t believe I’ve seen a foreign holiday on our site yet. Buy Australian and all that jazz…
Jonathan Clarke
Deal Pinch Co-Founder
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The new design of DealMe is really great… I have bought deals from Jumponit, Spreets and recently StarDeals… Had a voucher problem with Spreets but DealsMix (http://www.dealsmix.com.au, where I saw the deal) helped me out.
I agree with “Beau Ushay” Groupon should have taken the cash… cause with the rising competition they need that $6billion to survive… 😛
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Hi, My name is Erick, I am the Business Manager at dealsguide.com.au We bring all daily deals site to one platform. I must say that we have had an amazing amount of feed back from our users in regards to Dealme.
More so with the national deals they are putting up everyday; most days we get emails from users saying what great deals dealme.com.au are having.
Erick.
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