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Your support makes all the difference.The group-buying phenomenon led by sites such as Groupon and Amazon's Living Social continues to grow with the launch of two new daily deal sites on opposite sides of the world, the USA and India, on May 2.
In the United States, mobile network AT&T, carrier of the iPhone, announced on May 2 pre-registration for its daily deals service for consumers living in Los Angeles (California), Atlanta ( Georgia) and Dallas-Fort Worth (Texas).
The mobile network will offer daily deals to customers initially via email, but reports on tech blog Mashable indicate these deals could later be sent to mobile devices.
AT&T's daily deal site ( http://dealoftheday.yellowpages.com) is expected to launch fully later in the month across the three cities in which it is offering pre-registration. AT&T is expected to add more cities to the daily deals service in the future.
The trend for daily deals and group buying sites continued to grow around the world as Times Internet launches its second foray into the market with TimesDeal on May 2.
Times Internet, owners of the India Times, and subsidiary of India's largest media conglomerate - The Times Group - previously launched a mobile deals platform called Active Deals around two years ago.
The new site TimesDeal ( http://timesdeal.com), which is completely separate from Active Deals, offers daily deals and sends out coupons by SMS or email. The site currently covers six Indian cities (Delhi-NCR , Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai) and will have to compete with other daily deal and group buying sites in India such as Mydala ( www.mydala.com) and BQLUB ( www.bqlub.com)
Daily deal or group buying sites work on the basis of offering a product or service at a discounted price for a limited amount of time. If enough people buy the deal then all customers receive the discounted price, if not enough members purchase the deal then no one receives the discount and all purchases are refunded.
In terms of global recognition, the two leading daily deal sites are Groupon ( www.Groupon.com) and Amazon's Living Social ( www.livingsocial.com).
Social networking site Facebook recently began offering deals in cities in North America and Europe via http://www.facebook.com/deals and software giant Google is currently testing Google offers in a limited number of US cities ( https://www.google.com/offers).
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