B2B online daily deals: selling what?
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Knight

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Back in January I was “eagerly awaiting a B2B coupon/voucher site like Groupon to be created”! In a January post Does Google have a deal for us? Yes I wrote about how the soon to be launched “Google Offers” would compete with online coupon/voucher giant Groupon in its consumer-focused offers and thought the B2B aspect would be a new idea. Well, I was obviously woefully ignorant of those that existed already.

Digiday’s article “Deals come to B2B” writes about a number of online services offering daily B2B deals. Groupon is now offering B2B services and products with an example being a US-based IT consulting company giving a half-off deal for a business intelligence audit or a cloud opportunity map. It offered $25,000 (£15,123) worth of services for half price. I don’t know how many it sold!

Digiday also talks about additional B2B online deal sites such as BizGrouper,  B2Bucks, GroupPrice and OfficeArrow. Some of these are for local services but some can be used nationally.

Another bit of news that I missed was that back in December 2010, Groupon launched, I assume somewhat quietly, Groupon Stores. In this online environment a business can open its own store, create its own deals and run them whenever they want with the goal being to attract new customers and stay in touch with customers afterwards. The jury is probably still out as to whether this will be a success. One subscriber talks about rarely getting emails announcing deals and that on some of the websites there are no deals being offered at all.

Yipit, another nationwide online site offering daily deals, says that Groupon Stores was “dead on arrival". Among some of the possible reasons they cite for lack of success are the fact that local merchants tend not to have the skills or time to create their own deals, consumers need to "get sold" on a deal, this self serve approach lacks some of the fun creative advertising and writing that might draw some people in – and merchants, due to the commission structure, just aren’t finding it profitable.

It is total coincidence that I chose to write this on the exact day that a new B2B online deal company launched its site. MarketBlitz is a new daily deals site focused on B2B services. Their plan is to highlight a B2B Blitz for 48 hours on their site and advertise it through social media and email. The highlighted deal today is a conference or training room AV package for $3997.

While most of us who use Groupon think of it more as a way to try a new restaurant or get a discounted massage, we should keep this new model in mind not only for companies we may work for or have as clients, but maybe there’s a way to sell information or research services online. Hmm. Maybe that’s similar to what Google Answers tried to do in 2001? Just a thought and a reminder that it closed down in 2006.

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