This is the last update of the year.

It’s definitely been NZ’s biggest year in the daily deal space with many new players entering and many exiting too. It’s a crowded, competitive space that for sure.

Here are a few tidbits to note:

- Group buying site TreatMe.co.nz (owned by Trade Me) launched in March.

- Groupy.co.nz sold to the Yellow Group

- The original daily deal site 1-day.co.nz dropped their entrance into the group buying market.

- The two dominant players, Grabone.co.nz and TreatMe.co.nz are both launching locations based deals accessible from iPhone apps, following on with what Groupon have done in the US. This will be an interesting space to watch with our relatively low population density compared with the States.

- Groupon.com (the guys that started the group buying idea) went public in the US in November with shares opening at $20. As this goes to print they are now trading at about $15 – Yikes!

Final thought – Has group buying has lost it’s roots and pulling appeal? The original idea of these sites is that a certain number of items must be sold for the deal to be ‘on’. If they didn’t reach this threshold, then no-one would get the deal. The clever idea was to get people to share the deal with their mates so the deal would activate. However now, you take a look at all the main players in NZ and across the world, 99% of these deals are almost always ‘on’ because the threshold is set so low. You could take away this component out and it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

Have your say on this in the comment section below.

Anyway, that’s it from me. Have a great safe holiday and talk to you again in the new year.

TheSniff.co.nz

With the increase of these new daily deal sites, I’ve broken them into categories to make it easier for you to find bargains. Don’t forget you can preview all the main one day deal sites here

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

If you find TheSniff useful, Like us on Facebook and share with your friends!

With the horrid weather this weekend, I’ve found some time to knock up a fantastic new feature which shows all the group buying sites all on one page! This makes it super easy to see what all the sites have on offer each day. You can bookmark the page by pressing ‘Ctrl’ and ‘D’ at the same time.

Check it out here: http://www.thesniff.co.nz/auckland-voucher-deals/

Currently it’s only showing deals for the Auckland region, but will expand this to cover the rest of NZ over the next few weeks.

Let me know what you think by posting at the comments at the bottom of the page.

Tim

Firstinkids.co.nz – Daily deals on kids stuff
Firstinhome.co.nz – Deals on homeware
home-essentials.co.nz – One day deals on homeware
Deal.Acquire.co.nz – Daily deals on electronics and computer gear

2 sites removed:

Catchadeal.co.nz
Unsure what’s happening to these guys. It appears they may make a return at some point, but until then, they are off the main list.

Yahoo Shopping daily deals
These guys were powered by Hubsta. Hubsta went into receivership meaning no more Yahoo Shopping.
You can read more about it on the Consumer website:
http://www.consumer.org.nz/news/view/hubsta-receivership

View all the deals sites on TheSniff.co.nz

Here’s a list of new daily deal sites added to TheSniff.co.nz – just in time for Christmas shopping!

Travelscoop.co.nz/seats/
An aggregate of Grabaseat deals form Air NZ.

Spreadadeal.com
Deals on baby gear every few days

Ezibuy.co.nz/dailydeal
Clothing deals at 11am

Ilovedeals.co.nz
Group buying deals on things to do and eat.

Letsgetit.co.nz
Group buying deals on things to do and eat.

Spreets.co.nz
Group buying deals on things to do and eat.

Grabonebottle.co.nz
Group buying deals on cases of wine.

MrVintage.co.nz
Choice T-shirt/clothing!

Itdeals.co.nz no longer offering 1 day deals.

If you haven’t ‘liked’ us on Facebook, please do so!

Have fun sniffin’ out the deals!

Time on the site

As you can see from the graph below. One day sale hunters are most active around 12pm (midday). This make sense as 80% of the one day sale site deals refresh their deals at this time. It’s also when a lot of people have their lunch break and have time to check out all the one day deals on TheSniff.

I’m wondering if some of the daily deal sites that don’t offer new deals at 12pm would see better sales if they moved to 12pm?

Browser versions

Two other interesting graphs to look at are what browsers people are using to ‘sniff’ out the daily sales and what operating systems.

Internet Explorer is by far the greatest at 55%, followed by Firefox at 24% then Safari at 10%. What is surprising, there are even a few people using their Playstation 3 to browse for one day deals!

Operating systems

In terms of operating system, Windows dominates with over 85%.  Mac is at 12% which is rather high compared to other sites. It’s good to see that some of you are making using of the mobile platforms – iPhone, iPod, Symbian and the ‘magical’ iPad. These make up just over 1%.

Digging a bit deeper into what versions of Windows daily deal hunters are using – we can see that almost half are using Windows XP and 24% Vista and 20% Windows 7.

Well, I hope you found that interesting! I’ll do another post later on in the year to see how tings are trending.

Feel free to comment below too.

I’ll start off with my best one – it was a mystery deal from the folks at 1-day.co.nz a bulk supply of Piz Buin suncreen.  While it wasn’t exciting as some of yours, it was super cheap!

Share your best or favourite deal in the comments below.

Did you get a great deal with Deja Vu? Let me know below in the comments.

Experience deal sites offer great deals on things to do eg massages, meals etc. You are generally prompted to choose a city before you can view the deals. This is because the offer is city specific. On top of being city specific the deals often need to sell a certain amount of them before the deal is on. Fore example, the deal site might offer a $10 half hour massage. In order for the deal to be activated 10 people must buy the deal. So if only 8 people purchase the massage deal, no-one gets the deal. This is just an example – the deal numbers could be anything.

This approach on selling is quite clever as it actively encourages people to tell their mates about it and also purchase so that the deal is activated. Because the deal is guaranteed to get a specified minimum number of people ie the company offering the deal is not going to ‘loose out’, the deal is usually a pretty good one!

When buying this kind of deal, you enter in your credit card details. Your credit card is only charged if the deal is activated. You are sent a voucher by email to redeem the deal at the participating outlet.

So to summarise – If the deal is activated, you are purchasing a voucher that entitles you for a specified discount on a ‘thing to do’ in a city near you.

What kind of products do they sell?
Like mentioned above, these type of sites don’t sell products. They focus on activities and meal discounts etc.

Be sure to check TheSniff’s list of daily experiences and things to do deals.