A healthy appetite for food is something we learned naturally as children like ABCs. Much ado is given by parents about tots eating with gusto once they start grabbing their spoons and forks.  As adults, we give primary importance to making eating as pleasurable as possible, and we stop at nothing in finding the best restaurants to satiate our craving for a fine dining experience.

Now, foodies are restless in this age of social networking where everyone wants to take a photo of themselves and the food they eat, so they can Share for “Like” and Tweet for “Follow”!

There is no denying that the group buying bug is still viral and on its early stage of gripping the Australian online market of 10.4 million active Internet users as statistics showed at the end of December 2010.

There’s still a roomful space for players in the food niche daily deals scene.  It is now a matter of negotiating more quality daily deals with restaurant and hotel owners, refining services, terms, availability and capacity to deliver the goods so to speak.

Sydney alone has over 4569 restaurants and Melbourne has 4347 as search results shows on Yellow pages.  There are a handful of daily deals sites regularly offering food and dining deals all across Australia such as Spreets, Living Social, StarDeals (Groupon), Ouffer, Jumponit, but now we finally a site that specialises in offering great food and restaurant deals. Ta-daaa, Food Morning. No one would mind having more daily deal site like this.

In fact, the more daily deal sites there are, the merrier! With daily deal tracker sites like AllDealsOz, they canneatly gather all the deals on one page for easy and fast deal hunting. In the end, food lovers get more choices (and discounts, of course!).

Bottom line, the group buying fever is here to stay, the food market is impossible to saturate, and the need for discounts is as old as the oldest recipe.

Taking a holiday can be very expensive that it’s like an invisibility cloak making your savings disappear, permanently.  Knowing where to get good deals on flight, hotel, restaurants and activities, can save you a lot of money and make vacation guilt-free.

Daily deals sites provides the missing link between people’s need to take an away-from-it-all break and getting a good deal to afford it.

When travelling around Australia, you can just visit daily deals sites like Spreets, Jumponit, Scoopon, Cudo and much more to keep an eye on daily deals on offer.

You will be amazed at how different daily deals sites make possible very affordable travel packages accessible to anyone.  Livingsocial and JumpOnIt for example, expanded with LivingSocial Escapes where you can find deals on easy weekend trips at great value. Scoopon is also a favourite offering exciting travel deals both in Australia and abroad.

For those who want to keep track of all the deals coming from different daily deals sites on just one page, you have the alternative to use a daily aggregator site.

A daily aggregator site gathers all the deals for you, so you can have wider choices when looking for deals that suit you, but faster and with much ease. It does the job of searching across multiple daily deal sites in a given destination while spitting back discounts for activities you’re interested in, like half-price massages, dinners, city tours and other travel-related bargains.

Alldealsoz.com.au, for example, makes it easy to search for deals in a city or cities of your choice by classifying deals according to location.  Your deal hunting experience is more fun, focused and time-saving as you can see all the daily deals in the city or cities of your choice.  Daily deals in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane for example, are localized.

The key is that you are being directed to all the deals within the city where you are at the moment, or where you want to go.  It is proven to be more efficient for travellers who want to get hold of local deals for restaurant, museums, spa and other must-see and do activities, fast.

So the next time hesitation grips you from jumping into the dream trip, remember that all you need is a good deal and that it’s just yours for the taking.

Groupon, labelled by some as the daily deals site that kicked off the current craze sweeping the world, has seen much success in its home country of the United States and recently began expanding internationally. However it couldn’t launch in Australia under the name Groupon, because the founders of rival Australian discount site Scoopon had already trademarked Groupon Australia and purchased the .com.au domain name.

At the time, Scoopon said it had registered the Groupon name in Australia for “defensive purposes” which would ensure Australian consumers couldn’t confuse Groupon with Scoopon.

Late last month, the SMH reported that Groupon and Scoopon reached an agreed settlement of reportedly “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” with Scoopon agreeing to hand over the Groupon trademark and domain.The court case was adjourned following the deal brokered between the two companies, with both parties reportedly “pleased” with the outcome.

Now that the deal is done, Groupon has decided to from today shutter the Stardeals website and business, and begin trading under the Groupon Australia banner.

“We’re communicating the change in brand to all our customers and merchant partners and reinforcing our commitment to deliver the very best deals,” Patrick Schmidt, Groupon’s Australian CEO said today.“This is an exciting day for Groupon Australia….it’s a trusted brand that many people know, so to have that strength now fully behind us is great.”

After originally launching in Sydney only, the company says it now offers deals across Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, with special, “premium deals”, also now available in Melbourne and Sydney.

Traffic going to the old Stardeals website will now be re-directed to groupon.com.au, the company says, with all other branding to be changed as soon as possible. The company didn’t waste time setting up in Australia — they made their first local acquisition within weeks of the first deal going on sale, buying out Australian crowd buying site Crowdmass for an undisclosed amount.

Image Caption: Groupon rebrands in Australia

Source: Full Story ITechReport

There is no stopping the group buying market from scaling the e-commerce height and easily landing on top at such an unprecedented rate over the last three years.

Recent Telsyte study shows that the group buying market hit a 72 percent rise as of second quarter with retail sales of $123.9 million from $71.8 million end of first quarter.The study gave more than promising projections with the industry’s potential to exceed $400 million in sales by the end of 2011.

Other indicators cited are the number of deals published per month.  According to Telsyte Senior Research Manager Sam Yip, there is a whooping increase from around 2000 deals a month published at the end of 2010  to around 6000 deals a month currently.  This makes Australian “spoilt for choice,” according to Yip.

Despite the mushrooming of more than 50 deals sites on a daily basis over the past 18 months, only a number reported retail sales of more than $1 million a month.  The smaller players are high on enthusiasm but feels that the possibility of consolidation is just lurking around the corner in the next two years.  Yip further says that smaller sites will inevitably merge or fold as more players emerge, while leaders zero in on niche markets to capture more customers.

Top daily deals sites Spreets, Jump On It, Scoopon, Groupon, LivingSocial and Cudo are dominating the Australian online group buying market.

Looking at the success stories of Cudo and other leading daily deals sites, AllDealsOz sees five factors that have enabled them to trudge on the upward trajectory of the online group buying history in Australia.

1.     Financial backing

The top daily deals sites have strong financial support.  Cudo, as an example, is Microsoft’s venture into the group buying market joined by Australia’s biggest print and digital media companies – PBL and Nine Entertainment Co. Spreets, on the other hand, was bought by Yahoo!7 for $40million and is now run by the search engine giant.

2.    Heavy Ad Campaign

Cudo CEO Billy Tucker explained about Cudo’s strategy in an interview with Smart Company.  This includes going hard on advertising.  Indeed, hard they went as a national television campaign accompanied the site’s launch in September last year.

3.    Mainstream target audience

One of every four  Australians have purchased through a group buying daily deal site, a research commissioned by Cudo revealed this. Cudo alone attracts more than 800,000 unique visitors per month since its launch, and is currently the most visited daily deals site.  Cudo CEO Tucker explained that when considering deals to list on the site, Cudo isn’t much interested in the usual tech savvy crowd but intends to communicate with a group of people who have never even heard about group buying before.

4.    Abiding Best Practice Standards and Commitments

Much of Cudo’s operation is focused on ensuring that the offers provided in the site are 100% genuine, mainly because the company believes that the long term success of a group buying site is, to a large extent anchored on trust, stressed Tucker.   In fact, Cudo and Spreets initiated to come up with a framework for a voluntary code of conduct for the Australian group-buying industry.

The two companies identified a list of “best-practice commitments” to merchants and members that group buying sites should observe.  The two companies are inviting other industry  players to take a look at this initiative and share their ideas, hoping to have a final code that everyone will commit to in the coming months.

5.    Passion

This is about doing business and not just making a fast back but leading, setting direction, and being in it for the long haul.  It’s about evolving over time, and becoming more personalized in creating experience, and meeting market needs through real and quality deals.

Source: Telsyte

The number of daily deals sites online is growing exponentially worldwide, particularly, in Australia. With a strong increase in the number of coupons sold, subscribers signing up, and vendors wanting to put their deals, more venture capitalists have thrown huge investments into the market hoping to get a chunk of the money pie.

In Australia, more and more Aussies find themselves using Group Buying daily deals sites like Scoopon, Spreets, Jumponit and Cudo, looking for deals available in their city. There are now more than 45+ group buying daily deal sites in Australia today. Group buying attracts because it offers discounts up to 90% for interesting things to do and see around Australia.

While it is a crazy phenomenon, it has its drawbacks. For example, a common scenario is that some people buys a voucher but end up not using it before the expiry date. Main reasons being they have “forgotten about it” or they “didn’t have time”. There is also the impression that users end up spending more money and buying on impulse fuelled by huge discounts, time pressure (most deals last only for 24 hours) and photos of romantic getaways and food that you could almost smell from computer screens.

To use group buying and daily deals sites to your advantage, here are some tips to consider:

Top 5 Tips on Using Group Buying Sites More Wisely

1. Know important details of the deal – look at the fine prints such as the expiration date, restrictions on the number of vouchers each person can buy, the number of vouchers that can be used per visit and whether booking is essential. Look for information on what you can do in case you made a mistake in buying a deal. Can you get a refund?
2. Go local – know which deals are offered near you. Also find out the actual location of where the deal is offered. The chance of you redeeming the voucher is higher than when the deal is offered in another suburb / city. Also, you can save some petrol.
3. While it is good to try out local small businesses, you can also look for established national vendors. The risk of buying from businesses that might close down 6 months afterwards is lower.
4. Take advantage of the buddy system – When you buy with a group of friends, you will likely set a date and take time together to act on the deal. Nowadays, with Facebook and Twitter, you can quickly tell a few friends about a deal and get it together. Some group buying daily deal sites are also giving incentives for bringing more people in, for example, get $10 referral credit for every new user you refer.
5. Use a deal aggregator site like http://www.AllDealsOz.com.au  - you can see all the daily deals in your city on a page. Check all the deals in cities across Australia: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth.  With a few clicks, you can quickly sort deals by categories, ending time, price and discount to get the deals you’re looking for easily. Rather than ploughing through dozens of deals emails, you can also get daily deal email updates on all the best deals in your city by signing up. Using a Daily deal aggregator will save you lots of time, money, and make it very simple.

Credit Score Site

One of the greatest tech stories ever told is that of a startup company of a 29 year-old man offering discounts on cupcakes and sooner become the fastest growing company that digital giants want it for their own.  A’las, a David not fighting Goliaths but only wanted to make more pebbles for more soldiers.

That’s the story of Groupon cut for children’s bedtime.

It all started when Groupon, a Chicago-based group-buying website, jolted the tech world when it became one of the highest valued companies at a $1.35 billion valuation in just a matter of 17 months and had signed up 3 million members in just 15 months.

Much of its phenomenal success in getting its daily deals to millions of audience is attributed to the use of both conventional and relatively new Internet technologies – email and Facebook.  But one potent instrument that can either be classified as old or new is the word of mouth via its now 13 million subscribers.