Last week Daily Deal Media held a conference in Chicago. The conference focused on the state of the daily deal industry and what the future holds for daily deals. The panels and speakers covered topics from mobile solutions to merchant services to legal environment as they relate to daily deal sites.
photo credit: Daily Deal Media
We went to the conference to learn about our industry and in turn make Dealy into a better product for our users. While the conference was directed more at daily deal sites themselves, the Dealy team still walked away with valuable information.
One of the highlights was hearing from Entertainment.com Chairman & CEO, Dean Debiase. Dean shared some great statistics and research that he has gathered from his experience. “There’s not enough innovation; there’s mostly imitation. This is usually followed by consolidation,” he claimed.
Here are some interesting tidbits we learned
- Some question if merchants continue to offer such steep discounts. E-commerce stores have been able to offer these discounts for years.
- 50% of offline purchases are touched online
- 35% of people use a different email for purchasing than the email they use for signing up to a Daily Deal site – survey by DealNation
- The bottom line is that “Customers are attracted to great deals, and that is something that is never going to change.”
How this conference affects Dealy
Dealy is a unique product in the whirlwind of daily deal companies that are popping up like mushrooms. I believe Dealy is one of the innovators that Dean Debiase talked about.
- Dealy innovates technology for E-commerce stores. Deal of the day sites are really a stem from E-commerce stores.
- E-commerce stores have been able to offer huge discounts for years, the daily deal craze helps these stores to gain that marketing power.
- We learned much about the industry. We have ideas that will make Dealy even better, so stay tuned!
Sidenote: We went to visit Groupon!
On Thursday we took a break from the conference and went over to the Groupon headquarters in Chicago. We toured their offices for a bit and got to see how they work a little bit. We got some valuable information about the industry. It pays to have cool friends.
