broke a million unique visitors in June.”
“In four months, we’ve gone from zero to over 4 million uniques [total],” he says.
So what’s the key to building a successful group buying site that provides interesting and targeted deals for consumers, and significant value for local merchants? For Tobias the answer is two-fold. It’s about investing in a mutually beneficial partnership with merchants, and developing a platform outside of the Tippr consumer brand to help other businesses capitalize on the deal-a-day trend.
“While we have our own consumer brand, Tippr.com, we are primarily a software company,” Tobias says. Ever since the Tippr site went live four months ago, the company has been building out a second branch of business that involves partnering with and outfitting what Tobias calls “white label” sites that already have a strong brand, large audiences, with daily deal functionality.
And the strategy has worked so far with sites like Chicago’s Chitown Deals, which Tippr acquired back in June, and the 365 Things To Do In Austin blog, which partnered up to create a Tippr-powered stand-alone site geared toward its 108,000 plus Facebook fans, an audience that Tobias says his sites may not have been reaching before.
“The advantage is that by partnering with people who already have an audience [is that they] provide context for the deals. When people see deals on a site about cool things to do in Austin, they buy at about 10 times the rate than when they just see it on a deals site, because their seeing it in context of media they’re already reading,” Tobias says. “Consumers spend time reading sports pages, they spend time reading Xconomy, they spend time reading newspapers and watching TV. If you see deals in context there, those are relevant and interesting and you’re going to buy those at a much higher rate. And somebody has to provide that technology to those businesses because they’re not in the deal-a-day business.”
And while he says that 90 percent of Tippr’s traffic currently comes through its 10 branded sites, he sees that changing fast. “Six months from now I bet 90 percent of my traffic comes through my white label sites.”
Anyone can build a brand, Tobias says, but what he’s doing is becoming an “arms dealer.”
Tobias’s strategy of powering-up local merchants and businesses for the daily deals business is not too far off from the approach WhitePages is employing with DealPop. I spoke with WhitePages chief operating officer Kevin Nakao. He came to the company when it acquired Seattle-based startup Snapvine two years ago. We talked about the people and business search site’s move into social buying. He says the growth into local e-commerce was a logical one.
“For WhitePages it’s a basic extension of what we do today. We’re a top 50 website that helps consumers find content information for both consumers and businesses,” Nakao says. “We made our money by sponsored ad links, and we’re trying to take that a step further by adding relevant deals.”
Many national brands have been extremely successful on the web, but it’s those in the local e-commerce realm—the mom and pop businesses—that stand to benefit from the site, he says. “It’s a win-win [because] the customer gets a really good deal, and the merchant gets to work with WhitePages in online marketing without having to know a whole lot about the web.”
So what differentiates DealPop from the crowd? Much like the theory behind Tobias’s “white label” sites, WhitePages already has an audience of millions of users—and valuable market data based on user searches and demographics—to provide a more targeted, successful deal service that is truly local, according to Nakao.
“We already have 20 million customers coming to our site today,” Nakao says. “And because we have a lot of people coming to our sites doing searches, we have a lot of information on what the most popular bars are in Seattle…to have really great offers, you have to have a really great audience, which we already have built.”
The demographic data is key according to Nakao. Using information from popular WhitePages searches—say, for the most searched
