First there was Jump on It, Groupon and Deals. Now Facebook is looking to jump on the bargain bandwagon and launch a similar service from their ubiquitous social networking site.
And who can blame them? With over 550 million consumers at their fingertips, it could be one of the most strategically sound moves the social network could make as it looks to further monetise its operation.
And it’s not only consumers Facebook has in abundance.
Mark Zuckerburg’s operation also has millions of business at its fingertips who it can entice to sell its services. Its latest announcement reads as an intent to expand its deal service and work more closely with business.
“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,” it announced yesterday.
The groups deals service will allow users to share discounted deals with friends with hundreds of their friends.
Its current deals service operates on a location base only and is more focused towards mobile users based on its ‘check in service”. Earlier this month it released new metrics that tell business ‘place owners’ the number of times people checked in or claimed a deal at their place.
Although online group deals are hot property right now, the network are testing the service in US cities of Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas and Austin, Texas, according to Bloomberg report.
And growth of edeals looks set to explode from a million dollar to that of a billion dollar industry, predicted to be worth almost $4 billion by 2015 in the US alone, over a 400 percent jump to what it was worth last year, at $873m.
And it is an industry already well established here in Australia, with
US owned Groupon the most recent addition operating under the name
stardeals.com, joining the likes of Living Social, and Cudo.
Chicago based Groupon was prevented from using its name here as an existing Aussie company, Scoopon, holds use of the name.
