Attack of the Groupon clones 2 – If you can't beat 'em, aggregate 'em

[UK] There doesn’t seem to be a week gone by without the launch of another Groupon clone. In fact, so hot is the group buying space that we’re now hearing of a number of sites that do nothing more than aggregate the daily deals of the Groupon clones.

West Sussex-based Deal Romeo, which has only just launched, is one such offering. The site, which is privately funded and was founded by brothers Dexter Grima (23) and Jason Grima (26) in February this year, aggregates the best offers available from 12 of the UK’s group buying sites. These include Groupola, My City Deal, Scrum Buy, Wowcher, Deal Bunch, Viva Voucher, KGB Deals, Wahanda, Snippa, Likebees, Deal Mob and London’s Best.

It lets users search for offers based on their location and interests and have the results delivered regularly by email.

The offers themselves – the data – is pulled in using Deal Romeo’s “advanced system algorithm”, a fancy way of describing the site’s scraper as none of the group buying sites, as far as I know, offer an API for third-parties to access their data. That said, Deal Romeo says it’s been welcomed by the sites it aggregates who are keen to see their deals get additional exposure. Right now, Deal Romeo doesn’t charge a fee to be included in its index but hopes to eventually generate affiliate revenue via click-throughs, presumably once or if it scales.

Deal Romeo is currently available in London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Brighton, Liverpool, Glasgow, Reading, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff, with more cities to come, says the company.

As for the competition, we know of at least one other group buying aggregator. US-based localofferlounge.com, which indexes and categorizes 170+ offers from over 60 group buying sites across 50 cities in the US, Canada and UK. But I suspect there are others.