Merchants and Shoppers Sour on Daily Deal Sites By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER August 17, 2012
As their e-mail in-boxes filled with daily deal offers from Web sites like Groupon, Lea Pische and Edwin Hermawan, a pizzeria waitress and a former lawyer living on the Lower East Side, finally decided to buy one: a discounted Skillshare class on how to start a business. Their business plan? It was a service that would unsubscribe people from all those daily deal e-mails. Three months after its introduction, UnsubscribeDeals.com has 7,800 unsubscribers, a number that nearly doubled in the last month. Ms. Pische and Mr. Hermawan tapped into deal fatigue, a malady that has been afflicting the small businesses that offer daily deals and is now hitting consumers too. Daily deal services - like Groupon, LivingSocial and Google Offers - took off because they seemed to offer something for everyone: small businesses got a novel way to bring new customers in the door, shoppers got a discount and the deal providers got a large cut of every sale. But signs of deal fatigue are everywhere, raising questions about whether Groupon and its competitors can continue their hyper-growth. In the last six months of 2011, 798 daily deal sites shut down, according to Daily Deal Media, which researches the industry. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/technology/merchants-and-shoppers-sour-on-daily-deal-sites-like-groupon.html _______________________________________________ Please be sure to include a URL to the article. Reply to the sender with a "Thank you" if you like this post. _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
