New daily deals site promises ‘clever twist’, less emails

Yawn. Another daily deals site. That’s so 2011. Promisingly however, the latest entrant into the market SaveMeDeals.com claims that it won’t clog up your inbox.

The site, which will be operated in South Africa by the MIH-owned online price comparison service PriceCheck, is a deal portal aggregator. This means that instead of offering its own deals, the site displays all the advertised deals from group buying sites in one place.

Its entry into the South African market is part of an attempt to globalise the platform, which was previously only present in Latin America.

PriceCheck CEO Andre De Wet says the company felt that an offering like Save Me Deals “just makes sense” in the current environment:

With the local deal-site environment well established, some new players entering the market and many online shoppers venturing into e-commerce via online discount sites, it just makes sense to centralise this function. While considering a range of options we believe that the SaveMeDeals.com platform allows users to find every relevant deal site, in one place. And this is what PriceCheck and our bigger remit for all types of price comparison is about. Being able to compare anything on- or off-line is where we aim to be and this is another step toward offering our users the sites where they can find all they need. Just as PriceCheck offers this for online shopping, SaveMeDeals.com does this for all discount deal sites. Creating one point of contact yet offering a wide range of solutions.

The decision to go with an aggregator also makes sense when you consider that PriceCheck owner MIH decided to kill its own dedicated daily deals site Dealify in late 2011.

At the time MIH CEO of Platforms Stephen Newton told us that a daily deals site was not in the company’s “long-term interest”.

Guilherme Wroclawski, CEO of SaveMe reckons PriceCheck’s experience in the region makes it an ideal partner:

The partnership with PriceCheck is extremely strategic. They are the comparison shopping website for South and Sub-Saharan Africa. This shall, undoubtedly, provide a fast growth rate for SaveMeDeals as part of its expansion strategy. Additionally, the team has the local market knowhow essential to ensuring success. This is the first step to globalize SaveMe, which previously was present only in Latin America, and we could not have chosen a finer partner.

SaveMeDeals will however face competition in the market from the likes of Dealzone, and Guzzle.