Newspapers, Yellow Pages turn to NimbleCommerce for custom group-buying deals

by David Silverberg

A new company wants to bring the Groupon idea to newspapers and service directories, claiming it’s a win-win for struggling media companies: they cement relationships with local businesses while also engaging their readers with a burgeoning trend already trailblazing across the Web.

In an interview, NimbleCommerce CEO Prashant Nedungadi said creating a white-label group-buying technology “is a killer app for newspapers.” He added, “They can monetize their relationships with local vendors much more easily now.”

How does NimbleCommerce work? It strikes a deal with a newspaper or  a service directory, such as Yellow Pages Group. Nedungadi said it has deals with 25 newspapers and directories across the US, Canada and the UK, in cities such as New York, L.A., Chicago, Toronto and Montreal. They work with the client to determine what kind of branding and features they want their deal to include. The paper’s sales force goes out to negotiate with a local business to get an attractive coupon deal; NimbleCommerce doesn’t do any sales for its client, but it  powers the Groupon-type deal, allowing the newspaper to mass-mail its readership a deal that would offer, say, $89 for $250 worth of teeth whitening, as it did with Philly.com recently. Or the deal would be displayed on a banner ad on the front page of the paper’s website.

Once enough people have bought the deal, NimbleCommerce handles the distribution and fulfillment of the online coupons. The newspaper’s staff can look at metrics tools to determine a deal’s popularity.

“Newspapers aren’t in the technology business so they need someone to create a scalable technology,” Nedungadi said about his Santa Clara, California startup.

He was mum on details relating to how much NimbleCommerce charges its client, but he said it’s a percentage based on the volume of net or gross revenue of the partner deals.

There are some early stats available, even though NimbleCommerce officially launched to the public today: Nedungadi said 75 percent of group-buying deals purchases come from the media company’s mailing list, while 15 percent come from the display ads on the company’s site. A small margin originate from Facebook and Twitter. “They publicize the deals and we do the technology,” he summarized.

Nedungadi didn’t want to cite specific newspapers and other clients, saying many deals have yet to be introduced.

Group-buying deals can also be found in search results, Nedungadi said. Known as real-time flash deals, these coupons are displayed when someone searches for a certain service, such as plumbing, on a directory like the Yellow Pages. The deal for a specific plumber can display for an hour or so, available only to users who click on the deal within that time period.

NimbleCommerce is also focusing on mobile. The company offers an add-on to a paper’s app in order for coupon fulfillment to also work via smartphones. “It’s all about push on cellphones, so users can get notified about deals through push,” Nedungadi said.

NimbleCommerce enters a market bustling with competition and big buzz. Google is reportedly in talks to buy Groupon, and Forbes recently reported around 180 group-buying companies have sprouted across the U.S. since Groupon and Living Social began operations.

Aggregators step in to sort out growing ‘group-buying’ market

By Chris Hogg

Today, group-buying is all the rage online, with huge discounts offered in cities around the world. However, as copycats crop up each day to cash-in on the trend, it’s increasingly difficult for consumers to follow everything.

Group-buying online allows consumers to group together to get better deals or discounts when purchasing products or services. Using various new websites, consumers are given deals by email and the only catch ? and the reason why group-buying has been so successful ? is a minimum number of people need to buy the deal for it to become official. In order to hit the minimum numbers, consumers often encourage their friends to get in on the deals by sharing details of each deal through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, ensuring the minimum numbers are met and helping companies to grow. It’s an ideal business model because everyone wins.

Getting deals online shows no sign of slowing down. It’s backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, it’s spreading into virtually every major market, and media companies are jumping in and acquiring start-ups.

The king of group-buying is still Groupon, a two-year-old Chicago start-up that has been called the fastest-growing company in Web history, generating an estimated $500 million in revenue this year.

This week Facebook also announced it was also getting into the business with the launch of the Facebook Deals platform.

Depending on the city you’re in, the list of companies that are emerging to offer group-buying can be dizzying. In Toronto, for example, there are at least 24 companies offering discounts on merchandise, restaurants, laser hair removal and more. There’s Groupon, Teambuy, LivingSocial, WagJag, to name a few.

The group-buying game has also become so niche that there are sites set up for sections within cities; in Toronto, there’s a site targeting people who walk through a large underground walkway called “PATH” and deals only come from businesses within the underground.

The explosion of daily deal sites leaves a lot of opportunities for consumers to save, but it can also be challenging to navigate through the dozens of local sites to see if one has a better offer than the other. And if you’re not interested in the yoga offer from one company, you may be interested in the restaurant discount from another. But who has time to visit dozens of group-buying sites to check out the deals?

That’s where Deal Page fits in, a start-up aggregating start-ups. With a quick glance, visitors can see every deal being offered in a particular city, all at once.

Founded by 22-year-old Wes Bos, Deal Page aims to provide a one-stop shop for everyone looking for deals in their region. The site was launched at the end of September and Bos says it’s expanding quickly just through word of mouth. It’s available in Canada only right now.

“Traffic is currently around 1,200 daily visitors and growing each week as people tell their family and friends,” Bos said in an email interview. “I love to create things and this was an excellent side project that I could continually improve on. I’m a Web designer and developer, so taking a break from client work to hack away at something like this has been really nice.”

Bos’ side project has grown from a Toronto deal page to catering to visitors in 11 cities across Canada. As the site gets more interest, Bos says he’s looking to expand.

“I just brought on another guy to work on the site with me, so we’re planning on launching in a lot more cities with support for RSS, email and mobile,” Bos said. “Right now we’re focused on Canada but looking at the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States to see what would be best to get into.”

So what’s in it for Bos? In addition to providing consumers with a website that lets consumers see all city deals in one place, Bos can also earn money by referring people to each service.

“My first group buy was for a coupon at a local pub,” Bos said. “I bought it and then shared the link on Facebook. A few days later I logged in and was surprised to see I made $40 [in referrals]. So once all these sites started to pop up, I was getting more and more email and I thought about creating a page that pulled in all of the latest deals in Toronto.”

Deal Page was created using publicly available data group-buying sites provide in order to spread themselves among the developer community. Using their APIs and what Bos calls “some secret sauce PHP scrips that run every few hours,” the site essentially creates itself dynamically using data provided to it.

Bos says he can put together a new deal page for a city in about 20 minutes or so, depending on what data is available.

With the rising popularity of these discount-deal sites, group-buying aggregators such as Deal Page are also increasing in popularity and Bos is not alone in the industry. DealGator and CakeDeals, to name a few, offers similar services.

“There are about 130 daily deal sites in North America right now,” Simon Wong, co-founder of CakeDeals, said in an email interview. “It was very inconvenient to visit multiple deal sites or to receive multiple emails every day. In order to make our own lives easier, we made a simple aggregator that allowed us to see all the deals in one place.”

CakeDeals launched a month ago around the same time as Deal Page and has attracted 10,000 visitors to the site in the last month. The company is running in 13 cities, including seven in Canada and six in the United States.

“One of the interesting use cases we discovered was that our users would subscribe to a foreign city before visiting it,” said Wong. “This way they can start snapping up amazing deals for dining and activities for their vacation. We are in the process of expanding to some Asian cities, such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei.”

Similar to the competitive group-buying landscape, group-buying aggregators face steep competition from companies who are backed by big money. DailyD, for example, aggregates deals from 53 cities and the company recently raised $5 million in funding.

Deal Page’s Wes Bos says he plans to grow and compete online by focusing on the user-interface and keeping things simple. What the competition is doing, he says, is secondary.

“I am really happy with our layout and user interface, which I’ve heard lots of good feedback about,” Bos said. “When I built the site I had no idea anyone else had one of these sites so I wasn’t influenced by any of them ? I just made a site I would like to see while having my coffee every morning. The sites features are ever evolving based on visitor feedback, so I try and focus less on what competitors are doing and more on what works and makes people happy.”

Bos, who is finishing up his Bachelor of Commerce in Business Technology management at Ryerson University, also maintains a competitive advantage by fostering relationships with owners of group-buying sites in order to make sure he has their sites on Deal Page when they launch.

“We are currently working on some ideas to pull in additional money from sites that want to promote themselves on DealPage,” he said. “It’s a really easy site to convert because people come to the site looking to click.”

[Via Chris Hogg & Digital Journal]

Facebook launches Groupon competitor with ‘Deals’ platform

By Chris Hogg

At a press conference at its head office today, Facebook announced a new Deals platform that allows local merchants to target and offer deals to Facebook users. The new platform could prove to be big competition for social-buying giant Groupon.

The Deals platform is built around Facebook’s Places feature. It allows users to find specials around them, and it allows merchants to offer specials to drive more business, without paying Facebook a dime.

The Deals platform allows users to launch Facebook on their mobile and search for deals available around them, see what deals their friends have purchased, and see what deals are being offered by businesses they “like.”

Deals can range from everything to discounts at restaurants, to clothing stores, to coffee shops and more. Once a user finds a deal they want, they can go into the store and claim the discount.

Facebook says its Deals product is designed to solve an age-old problem of getting local businesses online. The company says local businesses have been told for years they should be online, but local business owners don’t always see the value. Facebook says its platform provides a reason to be online, as it allows merchants to turn fans and visitors into “real people, real dollars and real experiences.”

On the merchant side, Facebook says the deal set-up process is simple: Merchants visit a single page where they can specify two lines of text to describe a deal, when it expires and how many deals are offered.

Four types of deals are available: Individual deals, loyalty deals, friend deals and charity deals. Individual deals target an individual user; loyalty deals offer incentive to get users to come back often (for example, offering a free coffee if the user buys two at previous visits); friend deals to offer incentive to get users to bring in large groups (for example, offering a group of four people a discount at a restaurant); and charity deals.

Self-serve deals are coming to all companies on Facebook in the near future. For today’s launch announcement, Facebook is partnersing with The Gap, which will give away 10,000 pairs of bluejeans to people who check-in at a Gap store.

Facebook’s Deals feature is available in the United States and will be rolled out in other regions later.

By adding a social business layer to its Places product, Facebook is likely to attract businesses who currently use social buying tools such as Groupon. The big difference, however, is that deals from Facebook could be more inexpensive for retailers.

“To be clear, we don’t get paid for the deals,” said Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the press conference. “They’re user value and value to the businesses. If a business wants, they can also advertise on the ad system we’ve had for years. For now, the whole premise is this is something great for people who are using this system. Check in, tag three of your friends and everyone gets a free ice-cream. That’s good. That hasn’t been done before.”

Facebook offering deals without taking a cut of the margins could put a huge dent in sales from competing deal-maker Groupon.

Groupon is currently the leading deal-of-the-day site that offers group discounts on everything from spa services to restaurant deals to discounts at major retailers. Deals are offered to members by email and through social media.

Groupon, a two-year-old startup out of Chicago, is the fastest-growing company in Web history, generating more than $500 million in revenue this year, according to Forbes. Valued at $1.35 billion, Groupon has seen competitors and copy-cat sites crop up in markets all over the world in an effort to cash-in on the group-buying craze.

Unlike Facebook’s new Deals feature, however, Groupon takes a cut of all revenue generated from daily deals. So if a user buys a coupon for something via Groupon, the retailer gets a percentage and Groupon takes a percentage.

With Facebook’s Deals feature, the retailer could offer the same service without having to lose any of its margin to a partner. The merchant could also benefit by being visible to a user’s entire friend feed on Facebook, and by being able to target people who are physically close to them.

A Facebook blog post lists other potential Deals coming to the U.S. in the near future.

[ Via Chris Hogg, Digital Journal]

Toronto Star uses Groupon to drive subscriptions

By Chris Hogg

As the debate and discussion about the future of print media continues, the Toronto Star is moving to social media and the Web to promote its printed edition through a partnership with Groupon.

Groupon is the leading deal-of-the-day site that offers group discounts on everything from spa services, to restaurant deals, to discounts at major retailers and more. Deals are offered to members by email and through social media.

Today, the Toronto Star is being featured on Groupon with a deal that offers people the chance to get a six-month subscription to the Saturday edition of the Toronto Star for $15 (regular priced $37).

A two-year-old start-up, Groupon is the fastest-growing company in Web history, generating more than $500 million in revenue this year according to Forbes. Valued at $1.35 billion, Groupon has seen competitors and copy-cat sites crop up in markets all over the world in an effort to cash-in on the group-buying craze.

In fact, the growing popularity of group-buying sites prompted Torstar Digital, the company’s digital arm, to acquire Groupon competitor WagJag recently.

With Groupon’s massive reach and proven track record for selling, it’s no surprise the Toronto Star is looking for Groupon to help drive subscription numbers.

The ironic part of this deal is that companies used to turn to newspapers to get their message far and wide, and now newspapers are turning to a start-up to achieve the same exposure.

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This blog post is part of the Future of Media‘s ongoing coverage and examination of what’s happening in the media around the world. If you have a story idea, please contact us. This blog post was originally posted on chrishogg.me.