Daily deal sites Look To Innovate in Their Business Model

Traditionally, the daily deal sites have been mostly about helping you save money (even if said savings have been mostly been in useless things like spa sessions and computer tuneups that you might well do without). Well, that's been the tradition with these businesses for as far back as tradition goes in these things - about two years. These days, people seem to be getting tired of the kinds of offers they usually come up with, and Groupon and the rest of them are trying new ways to tempt their buyers with. For instance, they're trying to get them to spend more to buy higher-quality stuff.

You would never expect a nickel and dime store to offer a co-branded credit card, would you? Well LivingSocial now has a credit card with Chase. You get that card, and there's no annual fee. Not to mention, for every 10 things that you buy on LivingSocial each month, you'll earn $10 worth of credits.

They even have a VIP membership club. You pay $30 to be a member, and they'll give you first dibs on certain special sales. You'll also get to buy into any deal after it's expired. So all you need to do is to get this membership, and it's like you’re King of the Castle.

For daily deal sites that struggle to stand apart from the crowd, loyalty cards and credit cards are a great way to get a better class of consumer and to inspire a little bit of loyalty. A quick look around the Internet is enough to see that the buzz about the review sites has died down. These businesses need to either find new ways to keep consumers interested, or they need to get ready to  fall by the wayside.

What makes premium memberships even more attractive to the daily deal sites is that it geives them the opportunity to really observe close-up how the higher-end consumer behaves. Customer behavior is very valuable. Researchers study this data and there's a good bit of money this. With this kind of insight, the daily deal sites will be able to structure their deals in much more attractive ways.

Of course, things might work out well for the daily deal sites in the end if they keep trying . Butto evolve their business this aggressively. Whether it's good news for the VIP members, is a completely different matter. If the regular daily deal member routinely gets 75% off on everything, what can the VIP members actually hope for that's all that great? This might actually work against the daily dealbusinesses. When they offer their special deals to their VIP members first, won't this annoy the regular members? When it's their turn, they will never have any left.