There’s so many deal-of-the-day and group deal sites in Australia, it’s not surprising that there’s also been a boom in services which aggregate the deals from those sites on a single page. But which offer the most comprehensive coverage?
Picture by Conrad Bakker
The local bargain market is evolving rapidly – just today, Yahoo!7 announced it was buying Spreets. I’d imagine there’ll be a lot of consolidation over the next year, but in the meantime what is a consumer to do? An aggregation site is one obvious solution.
In the table below, we’ve summarised which existing deal sites are covered by each of the four aggregators we’re aware of:
A tick indicates that the site lists deals from that service.
As you can see from the table, it’s not a particularly even contest. AllTheDeals covers the most sites by far, with DealDump a somewhat distant second. While the whole point of an aggregation site is to make you aware of as many deals as possible, other factors do come into play. Buyii focuses on group deal sites, and in that space its coverage is pretty complete. BargainDesk runs as an Adobe AIR app rather than within your browser. DealDump has a much less crowded design than AllTheDeals, which might be more appealing for quick browsing. AllTheDeals offers both RSS and iPhone options, which makes accessing it on the go simpler.
For all that, there’s part of me that thinks bargain-tracking forums such as OzBargain, Top Bargains and Buckscoop are still preferable in some ways, since their community moderation filters out less interesting deals. Bear in mind too that you’ll still need to sign up on many of the group deal sites to take advantage of offers, and you might find that a particular site matches your tastes so often that you’re less inclined to check alternatives.
What’s your favourite strategy for tracking bargains? Tell us in the comments.
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Caesar
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 12:25 PMThe problem is that you have to filter them yourself. I find that sites like OzBargain which have users rating and commenting helps to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to bargains worthy of attention.
Jason
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 12:51 PMThe best method I’ve found is to join the OzBargain Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/ozbargain). The OzBargain community is to deals what the Whirlpool community is to tech products.
Southpatt
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 1:22 PMhttp://au.dealsucker.com/ is another aggregate site
Hugh
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 6:16 PMstaticice.com.au is invaluable — I’m surprised it’s not on the list. Maybe because it deals with something of a niche market (IT hardware, A/V etc)?
Angus Kidman
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 7:15 PMStaticice is great, but it’s a price comparison site – not a source of one-off deals as its primary purpose.
Hugh
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 8:05 AMAh, fair enough then. I suppose if “price comparison sites” were included, the list would be quite a bit longer.
Alex - AllTheDeals.com.au
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 8:13 PMHi Angus,
Thanks for the overview .. there are so many deal sites out there even we lose track of which ones we are are covering!
We’ll get those last few listed in the next couple of days, as well as having a think about how we can make the page less crowded.
Alex
astrogirl
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 12:08 AMI’m another that sticks with ozbargain. I like the feedback via comments with the neg/pos giving me some idea if its worth it or not. The members there are pretty quick to point out if it isnt a bargain and will usually point out a better deal too.
Rodney
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 1:53 PMTwitter… I have three streams dedicated to bargains.
One with all the daily coupon places. OzSale, Spreets, Scoopon, etc.
One that follows the list http://twitter.com/#!/list/perkler/loyaltycompanies (it’s not really loyalty companies even though that’s what they say. It’s more like a list of brands)
And my own general search that includes my favourite actual stores and people that talk about bargains.
Neil
Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 4:16 PMAnother daily deal aggregation site is
http://coupongroup.com.au/
If you ‘like’ it on facebook is sends through the most popular deal of the day to your facebook page.
David
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 7:13 PMIt’s certainly an interesting space and we expect aggregation and search will be a massive growth area in the coming months as the number of deal sites (in particular niche sites) grows rapidly. AllTheDeals is smashing it and definitely doing a great job of getting everything in the one place – that list says it all – and it’s great to see so much activity. We’re helping to make sense of the crowded deals landscape with Deal Zoo which focuses on categorisation and search (though it’s somewhat selfishly motivated as I’m sick of seeing a million microdermabrasion deals).
Matin
Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 3:19 PMHi All
Thanks for your great information. Here is also a new daily deals site in Australia i.e http://www.shareon.com.au . Please add this.
Thanks and regards
Athena
Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 7:52 AMThere are over 45 daily deal sites in Greece right now. I can’t keep track of them all, so I subscribed to this awesome deal aggregator site: http://www.dealpage.gr
Check it out if you live in Greece, or are heading there on vacation this summer! Tons of deals on hotels.
Ben
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 3:03 PMA Day Spa Specialist http://spargains.com.au
This site is Day Spa focused and will have related industry deals too. Good one to keep an eye on if you are interested in indulging yourself.
John
Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 10:32 AMHi Angus,
You might wanna add DealisON to your list. It certainly rounds up more deal than anyone compared here. This is the list of active sites we currently obtain data from:
1) Scoopon
2) LivingSocial
3) Spreets
4) Ourdeal
5) Jumponit
6) Stardeals
7) Cudo
8) GrabOne
9) Yellow Pages Offers
10) Jigocity
11) Smartie
12) Dealme
13) Deals
14) Daily Bonanza
15) Couee
16) Ouffer
17) Ezdeals
18) Ikoalaeveryday
19) Foodmorning
20) Zizzle
Thanks
Dave
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 2:03 PMGroupbuyheadline (www.groupbuyheadline.com) has launched in Australia as an aggregation site that ranks deals according to the deal discount and popularity. It also has an iphone app which makes it easy to go around the region and looking at all deals.
Sheldon Nesdale
Saturday, July 9, 2011 at 11:38 AMI think my list is pretty comprehensive: 68 daily deal sites + 21 aggregators
Deals United
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 10:06 PMDon’t forget Deals United http://www.dealsunited.net/ – daily deal aggregator covering over 100 sites (and growing) from Australia and New Zealand. Also has email alerts, RSS/Atom feeds and Facebook/Twitter updates.
JK
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 3:35 AMCheck out the new daily deal aggregator that just launched in South Africa. Its called DealScout (http://www.dealscout.co.za/) and consolidates daily deals from SA’s top group buying websites!
Vouchersin
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 3:32 PMDo you need to? Oh please… the merchants should be able to answer this AND be prepared to render the right service! I had a friend who bought a deal for a spa treatment and ended up not using it due to the lack of merchant support.
Richard
Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 8:44 AMhttp://www.hotdeals.com.au is another Australian daily deal aggregator, i think they have most of the sites listed above