The deals culture is shifting from customer acquisition to customer loyalty by necessity. Why? Deals have begun losing high-income women. That’s the view of Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim, a featured speaker at ILM East in Boston March 26-28.
“Daily deals had an initial surge then quickly lost flavor on a key customer segment — …

We’re seeing more vertical players trying to leverage their brands with deal offerings and advertising. The latest one is Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Twenty-two Blue Cross state organizations around the U.S. are working with Analog Analytics to launch Blue365, a deal program offering health and fitness discounts, as well as adjacencies like tax prep. …

LivingSocial, in a battle with Groupon and other deal providers to gain (and keep) market share, lost an eye popping $558 million beyond its $245 million in net earnings, according to a regulatory filing by Amazon.com, which owns 31 percent of the company. The filing was written about in today’s Washington Post.
The Post article notes …

Gilt Groupe confirmed today that it is eliminating 10 percent of its staff, including Gilt City chief Nathan Richardson and Park and Bond CEO John Auerbach.
The luxury-but-discounted goods provider will close several Gilt Groupe offices, including Atlanta, Seattle and Dallas, and several Gilt City offices inherited from last fall’s BuyWithMe acquisition, including San Diego, Houston …

ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and …

Local Corp. has branched out in several directions in an effort to leverage its local platform. It has recently acquired Krillion (retail and product search) and Rovion (rich media platform and integration). Another major effort is its development of Spreebird, a deals company being built on top of its acquisition of Southern California’s Screamin’ Deals.
Spreebird …

More vertical deals are being introduced, as vertical publishers with specific audiences seek to tie deals to existing content, and prove to have better conversion than watered down, one-size-fits-all approaches.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about Local Offer Network’s B2B efforts with Cardinal Health. Now, NimbleCommerce has been pushing on the vertical space, …

Dan Hess, CEO of deals aggregator and research company Local Offer Network, played mythbuster at ILM West, using data to set the record straight on where the market is moving…and where it isn’t.
Hess is convinced that there is still ample room for “specialization” across geography, demography and interests…rather than the doomsday consolidation/roll-up  scenarios forecast by …

How many small businesses have done a deal at this point? Twelve percent, according to a new survey of 2,500 SMBs by MerchantCircle. That’s about a third higher than MerchantCircle’s June survey.
The survey also found a lot of Facebook ad usage. About 23 percent of local merchants report having tried Facebook Ads to date, …

Companies are beginning to focus on loyalty programs for existing customers, rather than simply using deal a day to acquire new customers. Closely and WildFire App are both pursuing loyalty programs.
A loyalty start-up we like is Punchcard, which launches today. The brainchild of MerchEngines founder Andy Steuer, Punchcard is a smartphone app that provides a …

Amazon’s a sleeper bet to really shake up local commerce. But what does that look like? For sure, we see the pieces being assembled…the focus on Amazon Stores, the $175 million LivingSocial investment, the Kindle Fire rollout, the expansion of Amazon Prime to include access to a range of content, the build-up of Amazon Transactions. …

Black Friday and Cyber Monday for holiday shopping are bedrocks of the nation’s economy. Where do deals fit in?
As Bloomberg reports, Yipit Data forecasts that U.S. consumers will spend $80 million to $100 million on daily deals gifts between Thanksgiving and Christmas, up from $15 million to $20 million in 2010. A separate poll of …

In the wake of Groupon’s successful IPO, Angie’s List is apparently set to issue its own IPO on Thursday. The offering would raise up to $113 million for the Indianapolis-based company, which provides members-only reviews of services and medical providers. For us, the big question is whether consumers will continue to be willing …

PagesJaunes, the French directory publisher, recently announced the launch of 123deal in Italy, Germany and the U.K. The daily deals and local discounts portal and search engine is also available in France and Spain. The location-based search option allows users to locate categorized deals on an interactive map.
In the U.K., 123deal has 18 partners offering …

Image Source: Reuters via New York Times
Groupon’s final IPO price went from dank estimates of $10-$12 to $20 by the time it was priced, raising $700 million on a relatively small offering of its shares. That puts the company’s value at around $20 billion, by some estimates.
As it turned out, the price could have gone …

Image Source: Mashable
Groupon’s greatly reduced IPO is apparently set to take place on Friday, Nov. 4, in an environment much less friendly than originally envisioned last spring.
The bloom has come off for a number of reasons. Groupon has almost no barriers to entry and has had to contend with dozens and dozens of copy cats …

If you are a major aggregator of daily deals and the industry seems to be slowing down, what do you do next? That’s the question faced by 8coupons, one of the original aggregators. As founder Landy Ung tells us, “we used to get literally an email a day from a daily deal” site seeking a …

Atlanta-based ScoutMob has cut out the high commissions and has launched as an all mobile site as it prepares for the next wave of deals beyond the world defined by Groupon and LivingSocial.
The two-year-old, venture-funded site has 40 employees. It raised $1.5 million in a Series A round, and is looking at a $5 million …

A new partnership between Clear Channel and LivingSocial is seeking to leverage the power of on-air personalities on 500 Clear Channel radio stations. The personalities will rap about the deals in unscripted segments. It would be interesting to know what the split is for something like this. The arrangement is described as a “commission.”
We know …

We’ve long known that coupons provide real traction for SMB advertising. Nothing beats a customer walking through the door with a coupon in hand. But a lot of SMB website publishers haven’t really focused on them.
DataSphere, on the other hand, has had a coupons product for some time. But it only recently has really …