More Deals Blow Through Windy City With Wantsa Chicago

Chicago, the original home base of deal a day, courtesy of Groupon’s Windy City headquarters, has its latest DOD offering through the partnership of a prominent local publisher and white-label provider. Wantsa, a group buying platform that teams with newspapers, online publishers and social networks, is launching a Chicago division across the Sun-Times’ portfolio of properties. 

Sun-Times Media is the parent company of flagship daily the Chicago Sun-Times. It owns eight dailies and operates more than 30 Web sites in the metro area, all of which will be featured in the partnership.

Vancouver-based Wantsa is one of a fleet of emerging white-label deals providers that includes Analog Analytics, Nimble Commerce, Deal Current, Shoutback and Tippr, among many others. Some, such as Matchbin, offer a rebrandable and trackable deals platform (often in widget form) as part of a larger suite of online services (CMS, SEM, SEO, SMS, business directory). 

Wantsa gives participating publishers the opportunity to not only sell deals to local merchants, but also to select existing offers from the company’s syndicated network to be featured. Deals can also be displayed in a variety of formats to better service user preferences. Among the options are geotargeted maps for deal searching and mobile-optimized applications.