While most companies – online and brick & mortar – thrive during the Christmas seasons with Black Friday marking the unofficial start of the seasonal rush, new data on daily deal business released by daily deal search engine Deal Zippy, a site which combines UK daily deals in one place, shows that it’s the months leading up to Christmas that really matter for deal sites.
The data, aggregated from 29 different UK daily deal websites by Deal Zippy between October and December 2012, shows that October and November represented a peak in shopping activity with more of their one day deals sold than in other months in 2012.
Surprisingly, October and November 2012 were the most profitable months of the year for sites like Groupon, Living Social and Wowcher with over $50 million in sales.
The data from Deal Zippy is summarized below for Q4 2012:
- October 2012 Deals published: 5872 Deals purchased: 992388 Revenue (millions): 29M
- November 2012 Deals published: 5504 Deals purchased: 907540 Revenue (millions): 25M
- December 2012 Deals published: 4337 Deals purchased: 697047 Revenue (millions): 17M
Dexter Grima from Deal Zippy said of the data, in a press release‘:
“Unlike other online retailers, what we saw this year was that the early Christmas shopping period was the most busy and profitable for UK deal sites. Based on the types of deals sold, we think this is due to a combination of well organized shoppers buying online deals for things like electronics and gadgets, making sure they receive their goods in plenty of time for Christmas. We also saw consumers treating themselves to cheap short breaks, holidays and spa deals in the long period between summer and the Christmas holidays.
Some of the most popular deals of October and November were to be had in the electronics and homeware sections of Deal Zippys online shopping deals, suggesting that savvy shoppers were beating paying full price in stores by buying heavily discounted items on deal sites, claiming the deals and wrapping them as gifts. Other popular categories included both mens and womens fashion and photo accessories.
One of the most successful daily deals, which over 65000 savvy shoppers took advantage of, was an offer for a 10 Starbucks gift card for only 5.”
Source: Equities
