Given the massive success of Groupon (and the huge number of clones out there), it’s no surprise that existing publishers and businesses are keen to take advantage of the craze themselves. Some of them have turned to white-label deal services, which allow these publishers to manage their deals without having to reinvent the wheel. And today a company called NimbleCommerce is making its press debut by announcing that it’s got deals with “25 large newspapers; business directories and local media companies”.
You’ll notice I put that in quotes — NimbleCommerce won’t list off many of the companies it’s partnered with, but says that 50% of its clients are publicly traded and that it is “five to ten times bigger than Tippr” and other close competitors. Again, they won’t give hard stats, but the clients NimbleCommerce can name are solid: OpenTable uses its platform to run deals, as does Valpak and Canada’s Yellow Pages. The company says that it’s largely avoided press until now, and it’s finally ready to start talking about its progress.
NimbleCommerce’s platform lets publishers put together their deals using templates or customized designs. It also includes a dashboard for managing a businesses’s email contacts (which can number in the millions for NimbleCommerce’s largest clients) and handles the coupon distribution and fulfillment. The deals themselves are coordinated by the publisher or business that’s running them — NimbleCommerce doesn’t offer its own sales force.
The model may sound a little familiar — we wrote about a new startup called DealQuad earlier this month that caters to college newspapers. And there are also plenty of other services that offer white-labeled group deals, like Tippr and ChompOn (you can see a good list of them on Yipit’s blog.
