When I received the email from Living Social today, which called “Living Social Shop”, I thought to myself – that’s it, they confirmed the change. 
 
Although I myself has been a daily deal lover and advocate, in my conversations with friends, I could not help worrying about its future since its debut.  “What will happen when they run out of deals?” 
 
In the US, about 400 deal websites still churn out deals on a regular basis. However, comparing to the peak time when over 800 deal websites on the same stage, half is gone.  In Australia, new deal sites appear from time to time, but the key players are not more than 10. 
 
If you also receive daily deal emails every day, you can find since mid last year, every deal site already started promoting product through the offer. Some were quite a hit.  I remember there was one deal selling silver earrings with Swarovski crystal element was sold more than 60000 pairs.  Now, product offers are getting more, each deal site has at least 50% focusing on product deals and holiday deals. The rest are dinging, SPA, gym or other deals. 
 
According to research, the daily deal industry is still growing, although not as fast as a year ago.  With competition, fewer merchants want to form the deal; it’s natural that they turn their attention to e-commerce and selling products to monitise the huge database they acquired.
 
We will expect to see more deal site to pull off channel like “shop”, “shopping”, “store” and keep product deals to be there not for one day, but for a week or a month for consumers to evaluate and purchase.  What consumers don’t know is the same product might be sold on other e-commerce site for the same price, however due to the peer pressure (you can see how many people already bought the deal) and marketing tools like dedicated emails, etc. They probably will buy something that they never thought they need, from daily deal website.
 
Will continue watching.