These Daily Deals Put Focus on Ecommerce and Search

The latest entry into the dynamic daily deals space may provide the best opportunity yet for ecommerce merchants, particularly smaller businesses wanting to step up their marketing efforts to the next level.

WhitePages.com is looking for merchant partners to take DealPop - its successful new local group-buying platform - to the national stage. The company has signed smaller marketers like Boston Tea Company, Vermont Sugar & Maple Spice, and Hawaii-based Lion Coffee to help power the launch of DealPop USA, and is looking for more. Previously, DealPop was a successful local advertising product in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles.

The daily deals space was created two years ago by startup Groupon, whose historic success has led to countless imitators and intense competition. But until now, ecommerce businesses have remained somewhat on the outside looking in. The vast majority of partners in group-buying deals through Groupon, LivingSocial and the rest send coupons to local customers through email, hoping to increase traffic not to their websites but to their brick-and-mortar stores or restaurants.

Where DealPop is different is in its focus on smaller ecommerce partners with national marketing aspirations and a national appeal to consumers, and its ability through WhitePages.com to include search as part of the selling equation. DealPop merchants will send coupons to customers via email as they would with Groupon, for instance, but those coupons may also appear in banner ads on Whitepages.com and sister site 411.com - and be targeted to relevant terms used in search queries on those sites.

Together, WhitePages.com and 411.com receive about 20 million unique visitors each month, a high percentage of them consumers in search of a business, product or service.

Thus far in DealPop's local implementation on the west coast, WhitePages states that about half of the sales have come from emails and the other half through search. The model brings an entirely new channel of distribution to the daily deals business, and one that is specifically suited to ecommerce.

Retailers interested in partnering with DealPop should visit the merchant page.