The dozens of daily deals sites may have managed to do the impossible: make consumers tired of all the bargains.
“It’s already happening to me,” said one retail expert at Avanade. “I just delete them as soon as they come in. I’m couponed out.”
After the recession hit, the daily deal sites launched, offering big discounts to the many consumers eagerly searching for ways to pinch pennies but still enjoy themselves. Suddenly, shoppers no longer had to rummage through multiple store circulars to find the right deal.
Instead, these websites tailored offers to each shopper’s interests and location and delivered these deals directly to their email inbox each morning.
This formula proved enticing enough for millions of subscribers to sign up for deal sites.
But experts say they went too far and saturated the market. “Limited time only” and other buzzwords once used to score an impulse buy don’t work anymore because that sense of urgency has declined with overuse.
In short, deals that consumers once would have considered too good to be true may now be seen as too common to be good.
Source: The Street, August 2011
