Who doesn’t like a discount or want a better deal? The days of driving around or scanning the print media for coupons and specials are long gone. Along with most things on the web, deals, specials, discounts and general cheapies are now being aggregated into an online bargain market that is growing faster than we can keep up with it. In the US this market has gone from zero to a billion dollar industry in the last couple of years. The savings made on sites such as Yipit, Dealmap and Groupon range from 50% to 90%, all the time.
The change to our shopping behavior when it comes to sale time is that we no longer have to wait for the season ending specials or the end of line discounts to make significant savings. With everything from restaurants, retail shopping and businesses aimed at your city involved, you wonder how some bricks and mortar business continue to trade. Especially with the size of the discounts offered.
The biggest catch of course is that there is no catch. With business drawing on a web population unimaginable a few years ago, they become willing partners in discounting their products and sacrificing yield for volume. A bit like the way businesses salivate over China, hoping to just snare a small fraction of that immense population to make a profit. With the unlimited shelf space provided by the web, businesses no longer need to stock items hoping someone will come into their store to buy a product, instead relying on the mass market to find them via the deal aggregators and then sending products out on order.
The local sites making inroads on the Australian spending behavior include such bargain basements as ourdeal.com.au, jumponit.comau and spreets.com.au. All of them push the daily special along with bargains to be had 24/7.
So getting more bang for your buck now consists of signing up for the various sites offering daily deals and discounts on what appeals to you most. There are so many sites that if you sign up for them all, you may want to consider a separate email account to stop your mailbox clogging up with specials and discounts. With all these sites vying for your wallet and attention, confusion can paralyse your decision making process and you can become overwhelmed and not buy anything. Looks like a job for a super aggregation site for all your deal sites. What s Google waiting for?
Even the big social media sites like Facebook are joining in with search tools to find your favourite company and what their deals might be. Twitter followers already know that @earlybird, @cheaptweet and @coupontweet provide a range of discounts to keep you answering that phone, no matter how important the meeting you are in.
Not that we don’t have enough interruptions from the web and technology in general but this is different, there are discounts to be had and we all love a bargain.
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