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 partnership. “Now it is one a week.”

It may have seemed safe for 8coupons, in fact, to continue building as it was. The self-funded site has been profitable for over a year, and has already set up partnerships with 450 daily deal companies and 50 local “non-daily deal companies, such as Goldstar and Restaurant.com. “Each one is unique,” says Ung. It also provides offers from 4,000 other sources.

The site has also avoided being boycotted by major sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, which generally won’t work with aggregators. 8coupons makes the grade because it includes a variety of content beyond simply listing deals, including deal validation (“Is this deal for real?”) local shopper blogs and maps.

But six months ago, Ung says, the company had a nasty wakeup call when Google changed its algorithms. “We had been riding Google for the last couple of years, but we lost half of our traffic” (and much of its Google-based advertising revenues).

Ung decided the site had to go in some radically different directions, focusing on letting its 2.5 million unique visitors discover services and products. “Now we want to own the lifecycle” of how consumers use deals and offers, she says. “We are more of a service experience,” with a newsletter and other features,” adds Ung. “Even if the deals space collapses today, there is still a need for us.”

The emphasis on discovery has led to the ramping up in importance of such partners as Goldstar, the cultural events site, which is now its third-largest provider of leads after Groupon and LivingSocial.

One step it took was to partner with CityPockets, which tracks deals for consumers. Another step was to ditch the self-serve platform in favor of a deal with SignPost, the social media deal site that allows businesses to create their own coupons. SignPost had been a direct competitor, notes Ung. But “they’ve evolved into a B2B platform. They’ve phased out consumers at a time when we were phasing out B2B.”

8coupons is also de-emphasizing its efforts to aggregate shopping-related content. Instead, the company focuses on local “experiential” deals. “Getting local, shopping related content is extremely, extremely hard,” says Ung. We still have 50 bloggers we work with, but just a handful of them are truly committed. And those tend to have their own affiliate relationships,” which presents an inevitable conflict.

Ung notes that since the relaunch, 8coupons’ direct traffic has been growing 30 percent week over week. “The new 8coupons has gone beyond an aggregation and distribution platform,” says Ung. “It has pulled together the entire local deals ecosystem into a single hub, and is now the only hub for discovering, buying, organizing and even creating daily deals.”

The post 8coupons Relaunches Amid Daily Deal Slowdown appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In the context of Google’s reported $6 billion acquisition offer to Groupon, questions were raised at ILM:10 about the true potential of deal a day beyond its current two or three daily deals and banner ad e-mails. For Nimble Commerce CEO Prashant Nedungadi, the real potential is moving local advertising into performance-based models.

“Group buying is just one model,” said Nedungadi. “There are lots of interesting kinds of models. We haven’t event gotten into search, or Yellow Pages. Imagine if it was part of the search experience. That’s what we’re excited about.”

Ultimately, Nedungadi added, “we want to establish a strong relationship with consumers. At the end of the day, it is an e-commerce platform.”

Later, during another segment of The Deal a Day SuperForum, 8Coupons.com cofounder Landy Ung suggested another model is to provide featured listings. The site currently lists 1,000 deals a day. Some of the deal-a-day sites are providing aggregators like 8coupons commissions of 10 percent to 35 percent. In that context, the real value lies in having offers discovered. They’ll pay more to be a featured listing on the top of curated categories, said Ung. “Our partners are asking us to optimize at the top. It is a whole new business model we haven’t tapped into.”

During the same session, The Dealmap‘s Jennifer Dulski noted there may be additional opportunities with mobile e-commerce. Fifty percent of The Dealmap’s usage is currently mobile, although only 4 percent of deals providers currently have mobile capabilities. That is bound to grow quickly, said Dulski, but more work needs to be done to ensure smooth transaction capabilities for not only online apps, but also offline goods.

“The mobile transaction flow is very, very clunky,” said Dulski. The goal is to get to one click. The problem is that “Apple won’t use in app for anything other than virtual good. I predict they’ll change that within a year.”

The post ILM:10: Deals as an ‘E-Commerce Platform’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Deals found by The DealBot are added to 8coupons’ geolocated “MoneyMap” showing deals and merchant locations. Users can weigh in on coupons by affirmatively voting on a section called “Is this deal real?” The overall capabilities of the offering appear to be similar to Center’d’s “The DealMap,” which launched last month.

Founder Landy Ung says she expects The DealBot to add from 5 percent to 10 percent more offers to 8Coupons, which currently boasts over a million coupons from more than 300,000 merchants. The site has 1.5 million monthly users, she says. Most of the site’s coupons come from partners such as ValPak, Money Mailer and RedPlum. 8Coupons’ technology enables national companies to detail local offers. (That would have been helpful last week when I brought a Denver-based coupon from Einstein’s Bagels to Carlsbad, forcing the local manager to override her computer system.)

Some are also sent in by users — some via mobile, which was the company’s initial orientation and remains a channel. The site also aggregates “deal a day” offers from Groupon and 80 others, which Ung says have been very popular, driving a “spike in traffic.” In addition, the site adds context to offers via relationships with 30 to 50 shopper-bloggers, such as 89th and Broke. “We drive a lot of traffic to them,” says Ung.

The post 8coupons Launches The DealBot; Scans Web for Offers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.