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LivingSocial vs. Groupon = Consumers Win
If you haven’t bought a Groupon yet, you’ve probably at least heard of it by now; and if you haven’t heard of LivingSocial yet, you will. And if Yelp isn’t doing deals in your town yet…it will be. At this point, you might ask yourself what companies aren’t jumping on the group buying bandwagon? With predictions that the group buying industry will expand by 138% to $2.66B in 2011, I don’t blame them.
Group buying is a simple concept – give the small businesses a voice. Even though they can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on a commercial, they can go on a group buying site, like Groupon, (it is a form of advertising, after all) and work out a deal. Before you know it, thousands of Groupons are sold and small businesses everywhere get the exposure they’ve been looking for (Groupon gets a nice check, too).
It was announced recently that LivingSocial will overtake Groupon next year. The article states that “If both companies continue to grow at their current rates, LivingSocial’s portion of sales will overtake Groupon’s in January 2012.” Honestly, as a consumer, I don’t care who reigns king in the group-buying wars. If both of these companies continue to thrive, more competition will pop up, and if these companies fail…guess what, more competition will pop up. The more healthy competition there is, the more deals there will be and the more the consumer wins. My one hope is that these companies find a way to consolidate so that I don’t have to open up 6 e-mails just to see all of the deals in my area. Or better yet, integrate the deals into Facebook so I can go to one site for all my needs; they could call it “GroupFace.” For now, I’ll settle for subscribing to every group buying site out there.*
Do you have like one group buying site more than another?
*It’s really become a kind of ritual for me to wake up in the morning and check my e-mail for discounted deals in the area.
