The Race is on to be the Next Groupon Contender in Canada

You must have been hiding under a virtual rock this summer if you missed being bombarded online by Groupon ads that displayed photos of delicious food – enticing you to click and sign-up for their daily social deals.  Once I became obsessed with Groupon, I started to notice a myriad of other daily social deal sites explode onto the Internet scene.

A lot of the original daily social deal sites were based in the US and just targeted Canadian cities.  However, I’ve seen a number of Canadian sites launch in the past few months. Most recently, TorStar Digital launched WagJag.com.  I heard from a source at the company that they recently sold almost 14,000 burgers in a “Buy $5 for $10 worth of Burgers” deal on behalf of South Street Burger Co.  Man, had I known about that deal, I would have definitely bought-in!

So, how does one find out about all of these daily social deals in the frantic, busy lifestyle that we lead?  The solution – daily deal aggregator sites.  I’ve discovered two daily deal aggregator sites based in the US and one of them has just launched in Toronto – DealGator.com.  Yipit.com is another daily deal aggregator of note but they have yet to launch in Canada.  These sites aggregate daily social deals from other sites based on your specified interest in deals like restaurants, spa/beauty, travel and more. I guess that the race is on to see who aggregates all of the daily social deals in Canada first? I’m excited to see what other sites will evolve out of this mass daily social deal site frenzy.

I’ve read a lot of articles lately that talk about whether or not the business model for sites like Groupon is sustainable – especially when it comes to negotiating deals with larger retailers.  I’m sure there will be an eventual shake-up in this newly developed industry.  However, I will enjoy the fruits (or cupcakes if they’re the deal of the day) of their labour in the meantime 🙂