In a race to become the best deals site around, Groupon and LivingSocial have upped the ante to include realtime deals on their site. Pressured from smaller startups like tipcity, Cing and others have mounted and the real time has become the time of now.
As opposed to daily deals where deals are planned in advanced in a long, drawn out process, daily deals offer businesses the ultimate flexibility. These real time deals allow businesses to adjust their customer flow and scale their business.
Today, daily deal coupons are redeemed typically at peak times. This can become a hassel and diminish the amount of full priced customers coming through. When deals customers come at peak times, it creates more congestion in stores and takes away from the time best served given to full-price customers.
With real time deals, all of this changes. Businesses are able to gain customers when they’ve got time to spare and business is slow. It’s these times that deals are of the most benefit. By using new marketing techniques in real time, businesses can alure new customers who have potential to be much more than that in the future.
While Groupon-style deals aren’t typically our recommended course of action, we tend to make an exception in this case. Real time deals allow businesses to bet on themselves and level out peaks and valleys in natural business cycles. This is especially good for places such as restaurants which would allow waitstaff to continue receiving tips thus lowering the business’ pay liabilities. Of course, there are many businesses who can stand to benefit. Is yours one of them?
UPDATE: Groupon and Foursquare have just announced a real-time deals partnership allowing Foursquare to syndicate Groupon’s real-time deals given your location. This is a giant breakthrough for two of the front-runners in social media and group buying, respectively. Check out more.
