Daily Deal Sites – you’ve heard of them: Groupon, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, Deal Find, Eversave, Bloomspot, Angie’s List has one, Travelzoo, Zozi (travel related) – all of these offer deals in various approaches for a limited time to help build awareness for the advertised product. So Are they good? Should you check ’em out? I’m not sure but I’ve had some good experiences – here’s my say on the matter…
I recently used a teeth whitening special from a Brookline dental office (wow that hurt on the third pass) which I purchased for $99 (sessions typically go for $400-600). I’ve also used numerous restaurant deals originally from Restaurant.com but recently I look more and more to Scoutmob, which doesn’t require me to buy anything first and often offers free lunches! Yelp offers daily deals on restaurants too. And I’ve used a couple of travel/hotel deals which were great.
For a sample of what might be offered, here’s what appeared in my inbox this morning:
Isn't It Better to Eat For Less?
$25 for locksmith service
$40 for five fitness classes
$10 for $20 worth of fare at a restuarant
$75 for teeth whitening procedure
$249 for energy saving packet including door and window sealing
How do I get such a large sample mailed to me? Do I subscribe to all of these sites? No I use a deal aggregator called DealGator, which customizes the deals for each city. It makes it easy for me to scan the deals and see if anything good pops up all in one email. I’m sure there are other deal aggregators and I’d recommend using one if you want to know what’s being offered without 12-15 extra emails each day. And it also saves your email from being listed with 15 more companies (though I’m sure it gets shared somewhere anyway).
A word of caution – some of the above are newer and a few have complaints listed on the web. I don’t know how legitimate the complaints are but be cautious about using these sites. Again, Scoutmob is great because they don’t ask me to pay for anything upfront. I’ve also personally used Groupon, LivingSocial and BuyWithMe without issues.
