Facebook to test ‘Groupon-inspired’ daily deals service

March 14, 2011 By Andrew Couts

Facebook has announced plans to join the growing gaggle of group-coupon services.

The mad dash to make money by helping customers save it continues this week with a Bloomberg report that Facebook will begin testing a “Groupon-inspired” daily deals service to users in select cities.

According to an official statement from Facebook, the online coupon offering will initially be available to Facebook users in San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Atlanta and Austin, Texas. The service will be an extension of Facebook’s Deals program, which allows businesses offer specials to their customers through the popular social network. Facebook staffers will help facilitate the service by highlighting deals for businesses to offer, and then promoting those deals on the site.

“Local businesses will be able to sign up to use this feature soon, and people will be able to find Deals in the coming weeks,” said Facebook in a statement.

As far as the collaborative coupon craze is concerned, Facebook is already late to the party. In addition to Groupon, which sparked the daily deals fire, we have copy-cats LivingSocial, AOL-owed Wow.com and Yahoo!’s Local Offers. Rushing down the pipeline are Microsoft’s deal-aggregator Bing Deals, and the growing Leviathan of the bunch, Google’s Offers. Even The New York Times has joined the hysteria with the newly-launched TimesLimited, which focuses primarily on customers who are rich enough to make their joining a coupon service seem like some sort of cruel, upper-crust joke on the rest of us.

While it may be true that Facebook, with its instant access to more than 500 million users worldwide, is perfect positioned to enter the foray of daily deals, it seems to us that this market is quickly ballooning into a fragile bubble that’s all-too ready to burst.

That said, there still seems to be some elasticity to this sector, so it makes sense for companies (and investors) to join in while the getting’s good. Unfortunately, it only stops making sense when a whole lot of people start losing a whole lot of money. So enjoy your 30-percent-off steak dinners while they last.

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Showing 4 comments

deturner at 11:25am 16th March 2011 I can't wait for the Facebook coupons! I hope they're as good as Groupon. http://tinyurl.com/4g2awwc
scarlson22 at 9:34pm 14th March 2011 I'm cool with more competition. Because the more that show up, the more likely it will be that I get one of them to offer a local deal in my little community. When I first heard of Groupon I was stocked! But when I found that they offered no deals in my area, I thought I was missing the boat. But after doing a little research, I found http://steals4all.com which provides a list of daily NATIONAL Goupon deals that I can purchase regardless of where I live. So now I and anyone else in a remote area can take advantage of these huge discounts. If Facebook brings local deals that are in my area and if they offer national deals as well. That would be awesome!
ioman at 6:06pm 14th March 2011 Does Groupon spend a lot of money advertising on Facebook? I wonder if they would get cut off from Facebook when FB launches their own daily deals service.
Nora Shekmer at 5:45pm 14th March 2011 I think this test is going to show that Facebook Deals is going to get even more popular with all kinds of consumers and businesses. Facebook Deals has already shown they are a good competitor for Groupon. A great site for consumers to use to find more deals like this is http://www.dailydealpool.com. They'll email you daily with a list of deals from all the daily deal sites on the web, keeping you from having to search endlessly, but making sure you still get the right discounts!