Surprisingly, the daily deal fad that was pretty popular sometime back is now slowly fading away, but Google on Wednesday disclosed that Offers, its daily deal arm, is expanding to four more U.S. metropolitan markets, namely in Austin, Houston, Philadelphia, and Miami will now have access to deals from all of Google’s retail partners.
According to the latest announcement, Google Offers users will allow subscribers in 23 of the 40 cities where Google Offers is available now will have access to more deals each day, from both Google and its partners, under one roof.
As Google Offers Software Engineer Ji Yang notes on the Google Commerce blog:–“Matching you with the deals that you want is our focus, but we cannot do it alone. That is why we are collaborating with a select group of deal provider partners–including 11 new partners that we are announcing today–to bring you more of the greatest deals out there.”
For starters, Google is making alliance with 11 new partners, which include daily deal sites 8Moms, APDailyDeals, DailyDeals.com, DoubleTakeDeals, Half Off Depot, Morgan’s Deals, Savored and Urban Dealight, media partners AT&T Interactive and Boston.com, and online store creator Signpost.
Culling all of these deal sites together into Google’s own network is an interesting approach, and should make the service much more competitive without leading to a truck-load of acquisitions.
In its announcement, Google clearly acknowledges that in order to bring its users the best deals, it needs to work with partners. At the same time, though, it is also evident that these smaller niche sites need bigger partners to have any chance in succeeding in a market that is dominated by Groupon and LivingSocial.
Nevertheless, it is the best move in the right direction as Google backs down from the dirty work of actually securing deals and focuses on aggregating everything together, which is what it has always been best at. In fact, many have forgotten about Google Offers since it launched, but if Google plans to align itself with tons more independent deal sites, it really does have a chance at success.