A Daily Deal Software Franchise?

Restaurants and retailers have been successfully franchising their businesses for many years.  The internet, being only 21 years old, is just beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to franchising.  I have yet to see a true franchise opportunity in the daily deal industry, but that doesn’t mean that what’s happening in the industry isn’t similar to franchising.

First, let’s look at the white label deal site providers. The white label providers, like Daily Deal Builder, are in essence franchise owners who provide use of their platform by other people/companies in exchange for ongoing fees in one way or another. The software is licensed out; this is different from licensing out an established brand name and selling the same items as the parent, but I suppose you can think of daily deal software providers as the delivery vehicle for deals.  In that sense, the white label provider is kind of like the logistics operations of brick and mortar franchises, right?

Some deal sites have RSS or XML feeds that can be parsed by other deal sites, which means a deal site can basically aggregate and sell items offered on another deal site’s website.  Oftentimes, deal site owners are approached not only by vendors looking to sell items on a deal site, but also by other deal sites looking to sell their offers on your deal site.

Let’s look at Woot.com, one of the first daily deal players on the scene, from way back in 2004. For years they steadily offered one deal per day, and drove tons of traffic and lots of sales with their original and entertaining copy; and of course their great deals.  Now, recently Woot went into a kinda semi-franchise mode, in that they now offer many different daily deals under a variety of subdomains.  This is basically ‘subdomain franchising’ if you will… and is pretty cool.

But let’s go further and drill down into niche deal sites.  Say I run a deal site in Atlanta called Atlanta’s Best Darn Deals Ever and I start really rocking the Atlanta deal space and grow my organization really well, and now I want to expand.

How do I expand?

I have a few options.  I can add cities to my deal site.  I can add subdomains to my deal site domain.  I can set up a whole new deal site.  I can license my brand to another person for an upfront fee and recurring profit splits.  I can license my technology and systems.  There are lots of opportunities

McDonalds and many other fast food restaurants seem to have mastered the art of franchising, and in the online world we are just beginning to scratch the surface.

How do you see franchising on the internet?

Tyler Horne
800-794-7192
support@hcdesk.com

** This article was originally published on DailyDealMedia.com