First South African Group Buying Tracker

admin — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:29:53 +0000

Group Buying has really taken off in South Africa, and while MyCityDeal owned by group buying giant Groupon still dominates this space, some serious competition has been building up. In South Africa, Group Buying is however still a challenging space to become successful in and many of the newly launched group buying websites seem to lack the deal making ability the bigger players have.

With this space being relatively new, standards are also still fairly low. In some cases group buying sites have been accused of price hiking in order to make their deals seem worth more than they really are. There are also still some group buying sites who offer deals which do not come close to the level of discount you’d expect from a powerful group buying company, and it is yet to be seen if these companies will be able to successfully promote these deals long-term. Another trend seems to be poor web development and design of the group buying sites themselves. This presumably is due to some opting for off the shelf group buying website packages, or that the race to get the product to market has caused some to take shortcuts in both the design and the business model of their offering.

Over time, the quality in general will rise and although there are sure to be many more start-ups in this space, only those that are able to offer major deals and reach the wider audience will succeed. It remains staggering just how successfully group buying is as a whole, and once the wheat has been sorted from the chaff, it is sure to be part of many South African’s lives in future.

Pulsar Media has also recently become involved in the group buying space with our website AllDeals.co.za, not by offering our own deals, but by tracking all the current deals on offer by many of the group buying sites in South Africa. Our aim is simply to provide a service that makes it easier for someone to keep tabs on current deals in their city and saves you the trouble of doing multiple searches daily. We track and post new deals and sort them based on location and also make it possible for a visitor to sign up to our newsletters which will email them daily deals for their city from various group buying websites.

At this point we will confess: We’re also very new to this, and we’re aware that many improvements can be made to AllDeals. In future, once group buying has become more of a household name and the AllDeals brand has picked up some momentum, we will work on delivering a tailor made solution to offer our service as effectively as possible.