

Ask HN: What is the future of daily deals? - mmq


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tocomment
I think this is a great question. I've often wondered if instead of making
daily deals a big advertising gimmick you could instead make them for things
that genuinely lower the price when people buy in huge quantities and then
Handle the distribution etc.

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UntitledNo4
In my opinion Fab.com is the next step in the evolution from the daily deal
websites. The main difference is that currently it focuses on delivered goods
while daily deals were about services in your area, but I think their basic
hypothesis is that people love deals and will spend money in things they
didn't consider buying just because the price is good. Another difference
which I noticed is that unlike most daily deals websites, theirs are not time-
limit based, but rather quantity-limit, which I guess works better for the
suppliers since there cannot be a situation where they have to honour more
transactions than they could have foreseen. As a customer, I also noticed two
main operating models which I find interesting. The first is where Fab.com
have the items in stock and the other is that the items are delivered to fab
only after you have made the purchase, and sometimes within a week of
ordering, which might mean that they are waiting to make a bulk shipment from
the supplier, and perhaps don't have to pay for the goods until they have
orders. Another interesting feature they have is they give you 20 minutes to
checkout. This, I guess serves two purposes, the first is giving the customer
a sense of urgency, a "buy it now or lose it" feeling, and the second is that
this prevents blocking people from buying the product just by having it in
your basket (since quantity is limited).

There are already quite a few clones which I have seen seen. One is
monoqi.com, but I have seen others (just don't remember their names).

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makerops
Having done a fab sale, it is a balancing act; The supplier works w/ fab to
negotiate a time frame when the items need to be en route to fab. You get
payed well after the sale though. So in our case, we were selling designer
t-shirts, but we weren't printing them, we chose a couple designs to sell at
an "unlimited" capacity (artificially imposed by us on what we would think
sell), and worked with our printer, so they could ensure us a couple day turn
around.

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trafficlight
I really like what Humble Bundle is doing. I'm not sure how it could be
applied to things other than digital goods.

[https://www.humblebundle.com/](https://www.humblebundle.com/)

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coreymaass
I'd love to see this asked on Quora.

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govilk
great, if it would be user driven not span driven

