The only thing certain about the future of daily deals is that the industry’s future is uncertain. It’s not a play on words or a failed attempt at sounding clever. If you ask 10 people where daily deals will be a year from now, you’ll probably get 10 completely different responses. The truth is, nobody knows for sure.
We know that Wall Street isn’t treating Groupon well right now. We know that LivingSocial is looking as strong today as Groupon did a year ago after announcing a national deal with McDonald’s. We know that fortunes in the daily deals industry can turn on a dime.
We also know that users are often bombarded with deals in a way that turns them away from the services.
That’s where Frugalo comes in.
The “Daily Deals Dashboard” that launched this week hopes to cure the ails of the daily deals industry by offering a venue through which users can consolidate the sites they use into a single area. Rather than sifting through emails or visiting multiple sites, Frugalo wants to be the place where people go to see all of their offerings.
There have been other similar dashboards in the past, but the social component is what seems to separate Frugalo from the rest. It uses an algorithm that looks at geography, past purchases, and peer recommendations to point users in a more focused direction. Rather than getting hit with dozens of deals a day, Frugalo hopes that people sharing what they’ve purchased with friends on Facebook will help the site learn what someone will likely want to purchase.
Frugalo may just be exactly what the daily deals industry needs to truly succeed long-term.
It’s an amazing concept but one that relies heavily on the success of the daily deals sites. Will Groupon recover? Will LivingSocial continue to grow? Will smaller daily deals sites emerge? If the answers are yes, Frugalo should reap the rewards and will be first in line to receive good funding sometime in the near future. If the daily deals phenomenon flounders, so too will Frugalo.
 In order to succeed the whole deals space will have to be healthy. It’s still sorting itself out at this point.