When someone talks about daily deal sites, they are usually talking about one of two different types of daily deal sites, sites like Groupon, and sites Like Woot. See our list below for our selection of the best daily deal sites in each category.
The sites like Groupon primarily offer daily deals to local businesses like restaurants, spas, home services companies and more. The deals to these local businesses are usually in the form of discounted “gift certificates” (e.g. $15 for $30 worth of food at a restaurant). When Groupon first became popular, most of their deals were only available for a single day, thus the moniker daily deals. As this local daily deal business has evolved, almost all of the deals are available for longer than a single day.
The second category of daily deal sites are the sites like Woot. These daily deal sites don’t typically offer discounted certificates, but instead sell products at discounted prices. Most of the most popular sites in this category, including Woot, continue to offer the deals for only a single day.
Here’s our list of best daily deal sites by category – updated though January 2013
Best Daily Deal Sites (Local)
When Groupon became popular and started making tons of money, literally hundreds of sites like them were created. As it turns out, creating a daily deal site like Groupon is quite easy, but creating one that makes a profit is much more difficult. Many of the sites that popped up in the last 3 years have already shut down. Although there are still a ton of these type of sites out there, most of them do not offer very compelling deals. We have selected what we think are the best daily deal sites that not only offer good deals, but can be trusted to offer quality customer service.
Groupon – The Granddaddy of them all. They have deals in virtually every market.
LivingSocial – The clear number two to Groupon. They also have a great selection of deals.
Amazon Local – Initially, this was a partnership with LivingSocial (in whom Amazon invested $175m), but I’m not sure what percentage of the deals are still sold by the LivingSocial sales team. Nevertheless, the daily deals on Amazon Local are consistently high quality and of course you can rely on Amazon for customer service.
SweetJack– SweetJack is owned and operated by Cumulus Media – owners of hundreds of radio stations. They are expanding rapidly and are now in about 100 cities.
TravelZoo – While their main focus has been travel for many years now, they have successfully transitioned into local daily deals. There deals are often to upscale local destinations. If you like upscale local deals, you can also try out Gilt City – available in a handful of large markets.
Deal Chicken – Deal Chicken is operated by Gannett (The company that owns the USA Today). If they are available in your town, they usually offer good deals and they can be trusted.
Half Off Depot – Based in Atlanta, this daily deal site is not in a bunch of cities, but if they are in your city they are well worth checking out as they consistently have some of the best deals in town.
Depending on what town you live in, there may be one or two other locally run sites that offer quality deals. At DailyDibs.com, you can pick your city and see all the daily deals in one place. See our full list of daily deal sites like groupon here.
Best Daily Deal Sites (Products)
1 Sale a Day – Not nearly as big as Woot, but nonetheless very successful. They also have numerous categories of daily deals. (watches, wireless, family, jewelery, and now flash sales)
Yugster – A Woot clone that has been around for a while and consistently has good deals on a wide range of products.
Daily Steals – Another Woot copycat that offers great daily deals. They too have expanded their deal of the day product suite. They now have a deal of the day in the following categories – toys, mobile, home goods.
See our more complete list of daily deal sites that offer product deals here.