The difference between sourcing a service deal and a product deal is that for the former a sales person actually needs to convince a very busy merchant to offer steep discounts in return for new and hopefully regular customers, while for the latter it’s a matter of selecting items from product feeds that several product deal suppliers have prepared.
The cost of sourcing a product deal is much lower so it has become an easy choice to include products, actually many products, in the daily offering.
The revenue of product deals accounted for 28% of the total deal revenue in 2012 and the bestsellers can be found in the categories clothing/footgear and food/beverages.
The king of product daily deals, no surprise here as well, was and likely will be for the coming year Juhuasuan, Taobao.com’s daily deal site.
Leveraging merchants, users and their traffic Juhuansuan will be hard to beat (to be beaten) when it comes down to product deals. In the service deals they play a much smaller role.
In Q4, the revenue of Juhuasuan shopping (product) deals was more than the total revenue (of product deals) of all its competitors combined, and accounted for 88.1% of the product deals revenue.
See also our other articles on the 2012 China Daily Deal Market Report