Would an online killer deal work in Ireland?

There’s never a shortage of good ideas, moreso the resources to invest & develop them – so here’s something which has been kicking around my head which I’m just going to brain dump into a blog post.

I’m a big fan of the Groupon model where an absolute killer deal is available online for one day only, but would this work in Ireland?

This is not a new idea, far from it – as there are already a mixture of websites popular in Ireland, like ibood.com, eBay daily deals, o2 Treats, Boards.ie Bargain Alerts, and a whole host of other websites offering discounts in Ireland.

All of which are good in finding bargains, while iBood is probably the best in distribution, adding the mix of having local offers is where it would work best. The closest example I’ve seen is Germany’s CityDeals.de

Traditionally we’re not known for our coupon culture but we are once again becoming absolute masters at deal getting, so I think this would work well – especially with a good mix of daily redeemable discounts(like o2 treats & citydeals.de) with online purchases (like ibood.com)

How exactly would this work?, three simple points…

• Exclusive deals with a minimum discount or crazy value
• Easy to get, either buy instantly or redeem offline with zero hassle
• Sharable, make it easy to spread through email & social media

Is it realistic to have a daily deal with 365 amazing deals? in Ireland? probably not, but something similar to Heimatrpreis.de where the deals are weekly. Of course the big reason why something like this doesn’t exist already is scale, we’re possibly too small as a population to have an ibood replica where the demand is almost guaranteed.

At work, we’ve run WIGIG(When it’s gone, it’s gone) offers with deals like €10/€20/€30 hotels that sold out 1000′s in minutes – so the demand is certainly there once the distribution is high enough and with any of these deals you can set a hard limit of availability.

I don’t think it would be too difficult to negotiate an “amazing deal” with industries who would be welcome of new customers like restaurants & hotels and electronic & clothing shops.

Knowing what customers want could also drive what the deals should be, so team up with somewhere like whoseview and select some of their top rated places.

So would this work? I’d love to hear what you think.