(M2 Bespoke News) – Recent research by Hitwise Intelligence has highlighted the fact that deals sites might be losing their appeal after earlier research showed that half of the consumers registered in group buying websites have made no actual purchases.
The analysis by Hitwise Intelligence shows that deals site leader Groupon has seen a drop in the number of visits this summer, following a June peak. Groupon saw a 50% slide in traffic to its site by the third week of August against the peak reported in the second week of June. Living Social, in turn, reported a 27% increase in the number of visits, but the daily deal and aggregator category of deals sites saw visits drop by a quarter at the same time.
Hitwise analysts tend to attribute the trend to a number of factors, including the wide choice of retail websites and the lack of attractive offers.
In June, 1,000 people were interviewed in a related survey by Lightspeed Research and results showed that two in three consumers know about deals websites and two-thirds of them have signed up on Groupon, one in five uses eBay and 14% have registered on kgbdeals. Yet, only about half of the registered users have bought an item, whereas 59% of those who have not made any deals claim they do not find the deals attractive and 22% have not purchased anything due to financial reasons.