The Advantages of Offering Daily Deals on Your Website

Daily deals have become very popular over the past couple of years and now is a great time to look into offering them on your website. Why? Because it can increase revenue and give your customers a reason to revisit your site. There are actually plenty of other reasons but first I will explain what daily deals are all about. What is a daily deal? A daily deal is basically a sale that lasts for a period of 24 hours. During these 24 hours a unique product is offered at a discounted price — typically between 20 to 70% off retail. This "sale" can of course end early if the product sells out. This is basically the formula that makes these deals so appealing and so in demand — the limited time, the big discount and of course the thrill of getting something before someone else does. What are the benefits of offering daily deals? When you are updating your site frequently, people know that you are serious about your business. I recall not placing an order on numerous sites because I thought they were abandoned — due to the site's design, last time that it was updated or the last time that a new product was added to the site. By offering daily deals, you are telling your customers that you are serious about your business and that you are still there — awaiting customer orders. Daily deals are a great way to clear out items that you are overstocked with. I have ordered numerous items in the past that I thought would sell well and in the end got stuck with them — daily deals are a great way to clear out some of this merchandise. If you have many email subscribers, daily deals are great reason to keep in touch with your customers. If you do not have too many subscribers, daily deals may help you get more of them because they give people a reason to subscribe. As with email subscribers, daily deals are a great way to gain followers on Twitter. In addition to gaining followers, they give you a good reason to tweet about something. I have seen numerous tweets from online retailers that simply invite people to visit their stores and to me those tweets appear boring. Now when I see news, I find it interesting and appealing. Daily deals are like daily news briefs to me — a new exciting deal at 50% off always gets my attention. Daily deals unlike coupon codes, can increase conversion rates and reduce cart abandonment because the deals are publicized a bit better. A coupon code box always gives me the impression that a coupon code exists and when I can't find one I leave the site. A daily deal even combined with a coupon code box, can convince me to buy — even if I can't find a coupon code — I just figure a coupon code doesn't exist because the deal is too good. Time it takes to run daily deals Many people get the impression that it's a daily task to run daily deals when it's actually not. The majority of daily deal sites, setup deals in advance by scheduling them. If you are planning on running a daily deal on your site, you can schedule the deals days or even months in advance — this basically makes running daily deals as easy as setting up a weekly sale. How do I offer daily deals on my site? This depends on the shopping cart software that your store is running on. Most popular shopping carts now have add-ons for daily deals. For example osCommerce which is a free open source shopping cart, has a community contribution for daily deals which is called "daily specials". Just Google "oscommerce daily specials". I mentioned this one first because I've seen numerous posts online asking about a daily deal add-on for osCommerce. Volusion also offers a deal of the day feature on their shopping cart. I find their deal of the day setup very appealing (in terms of looks) and have seen many websites using it. Just Google "volusion daily deal" to see it. Magento offers an extension named Daily Deal/Multiple Deals and a few others. Just Google "magento daily deals extension". The very popular Wordpress installation has daily deal add-ons as well and the installation can run as a stand alone daily deal site or you can link the site to your existing store. There are actually plenty of ways to run daily deals and this is yet another reason why daily deals are more popular now than ever. For this reason, you may end up benefiting very quickly and easily.