Groupon and other Daily Deal sites aim for larger holiday shopping share

By Jeff Hughes November 25, 2011

We’ve already seen examples of holiday shopping getting out of control; some of you perhaps facing said craziness first-hand. This year, more people are planning on hassle-free shopping online than in the past, and Daily Deals sites are planning on grabbing a good portion of that traffic by pumping out scores of more offers than last season.

Groupon has returned with another round of its Wintertime celebration Grouponicus, where Groupo the Deal Bird brings magical stacks of Groupons to the true believers. Grouponicus comes to an expanded 41 cities (compared to last year’s 15) and will be offering new “Epic Deals” such as backstage tours of the Ellen DeGeneres show or cooking lessons from chef Todd English. The site also makes it more convenient to send offers to friends, noting list price not the price paid for gifts.

LivingSocial announced it would be offering half-off deals for Black Friday with 20 national retailers, including Verizon Wireless, Electronic Arts, Office Max and Sketchers. LivingSocial says that Cyber Monday will bring a whole new batch of similar deals from the same retailers. The company is also offering new holiday gift boxes which contain four themed local events and a voucher to use at one of the options.

Cyber Monday deal hunters should also be aware of Rue La La’s series of sales renewing at 11 a.m. Every morning until Cyber Monday. The flash sales shopping site, Gilt Groupe, will be offering new sales launches every three hours come Monday, and is throwing in free shipping on all purchases.

Despite the sharp 35% fall in Groupon’s stock Wednesday, a survey from LinkShare points out that people still want daily deals. Out of 1000 surveyed, 56% said they’d buy from unknown brands if presented with the right deal at the right time. Daily deal sites are supposedly looking at a $100 million in holiday coupon sales this year according to an estimate from the Yipit deal aggregation site.

Via Washington Post

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Cyber Monday: from promotional myth to e-retail madness

cyber monday

Not that long ago, the industry was labeling Cyber Monday nothing but a marketing myth. Skeptics said it was far from the biggest online shopping day of the year, that nothing would be able to trump Black Friday, and that it would be nothing but a promotional term.
And now we know they were wrong. Cyber Monday has legitimized itself and then some this year, not only by trumping its own numbers, but by impacting Black Friday’s as well. According to an IBM Benchmark report, online spending yesterday was 33-percent over that of Cyber Monday 2010—and it was 29.3-percent higher than on Black Friday, which saw a particularly high amount of e-commerce traffic as well.
Not only were more people partaking, they were also spending more money. The average order value increased from $193.24 last year to $198.26, 2.6-percent. But the real number worth noting is this: for the first time, Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day of the year in terms of sales, as well as the first day that online spending was over $1 billion.
What began as marketing buzz and e-retailers fervent hope that they could ride some of the Black Friday hangover is now a very real shopping phenomena. What’s even more interesting is that many online shops are witnessing Cyber Monday as the gateway to a months-long shopping spree. The Internet is a procrastinator’s best friend, and there’s no time like the holiday gifting season to prove it.
While online shopping has solidified its place in Black Friday weekend, the next emerging trends will be mobile and social. This year’s numbers proved more and more consumers are visiting retailers’ sites from mobile devices, with sales growing as well (both of these numbers were larger on Cyber Monday). And social networking proved to be a popular tool for discovering and discussing the weekend sales.
It seems to be an everybody-wins situation. Consumers have more options to shop how they want, when they want, and where they want, as well as social media outlets for optimizing the experience--whether that’s reporting unsavory retailer security guards or advertising cheaper online options. Online retailers are getting their due (and then some), and it’s not exactly as if this is at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores (at least not yet). The online hype surrounding the day and the amount of social media chatter and mobile apps devoted to it has likely increased interest.
But that’s short term. Long term, the game is changing—quickly. E-retail is undergoing an evolution of sorts, and what effect that will have on the holiday shopping season remains to be seen.

Web

Early Cyber Monday stats indicate record year

The holiday shopping season has begun, and now that Black Friday has come and gone, Cyber Monday is in full swing. We’ve already gotten the full feedback on this weekend’s numbers (which revealed most people decided to shop from the couch), but here’s an early peek at how online retailers’ favorite day of the year is shaping up.
According to an IBM Benchmark report, e-sales are up 20-percent for this same time period from Cyber Monday 2010. Most of this traffic is coming from computers, and analysts suspect mobile traffic will pick up later in the day. At the moment, 13.3-percent of consumers are using a mobile device to reach retailers’ sites and 8.5-percent are actually shopping via smartphone or tablet. We’ll have updates on these numbers throughout the day.
If that’s not specific enough for you, eBay has some early reports on what products have been flying off e-shelves this morning. The Xbox 360-Kinect bundle ($260) are gone—and were only around for 20 minutes. EBay says they sold at a rate of 75 units a minute. The $650 Canon EOS Revel T3i also impressed, and more than 100 DSLR kits sold per hour. The HP 3105m Laptop for $200 was sold out after three hours as well, with three units sold each minute.
Online shopping has already received a considerable boost this year, and Cyber Monday is likely to only add to these numbers. Be sure to read our run-down of the best deals out there today, as well as some of the top e-retailers worth checking out. The day is young, so expect the deals to go fast and the online shopping stats to climb.

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Gift your unused Groupons with Presentify.me

presentify.me

There are plenty of places to turn to when you want to shed your old Groupons. Sites like DealsGoRound and CoupRecoup have become the Black Market of the daily deals industry, giving consumers a place to profit off their less impressive purchases. But a new site is spinning that into a holiday appropriate idea that puts Grouponicus to shame.
Presentify.me takes your unused Groupons and LivingSocial discounts and pretties them up into gift cards for friends and family. While you can certainly pawn these off without the presentation, that makes it more like an afterthought than a present. But Presentify.me, which is still in beta, creates gorgeous and more formal cards that will keep you from simply printing a coupon out and stuffing it in an envelope.
Daily deal sites are trying to get on the holiday shopping bandwagon with discounted products and prompts telling users to buy experiences as gifts. And while there are plenty out there that would make any recipient happy, the presentation definitely leaves something to be desired. At the moment, Presentify.me is free and working on adding to its current repertoire of three designs. But given the larger discount-a-day sites out there that are trying to make a bid for gifting dollars, and Presentify.me’s initial buzz, we wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial were looking into integrating a service like this.