How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Daily Deals Mobile App

Updated 30 Jul 2024
Published 13 Aug 2020
Rahul Mathur 2623 Views
daily deal app development

A feature-rich daily deal app is not only lucrative but installed in the mobile devices of several people. This helps them save a lot of time and cost of a product or service, that might have cost a lot otherwise.

Technology is advancing and so are we. Each day we look at our phones hoping to see something extraordinary, that might help us buy something of our choice for a very nominal price. This offers a cost-effective user experience and the app is liked by all its users.

In this article, we are going to throw light upon the benefits of on-demand daily deal app development along with its features and the market-size for such applications. Let’s start with understanding with an on-demand daily deal app means.

Understanding On-demand Daily Deals Apps

It is always important for one to attract the user base, and how can you go about it? Well, the first and foremost thing to do is offer them lucrative discounts on various brands, eateries, restaurants, and services. This helps in bringing a lot of brands to the notice of the users and provide them deals that cannot be missed at any cost.

An on-demand daily deal application is infused with deals that cannot be missed. The new range of brands and deals are added to the list under various categories each day. Just by uploading the deals of the brands that are registered under them, they can make a huge user base.

No matter how much one earns, they would love to save even the tiniest amount they can on any product or service. This is one of the main reasons for the prevalence of daily deals apps.

These apps might be useful to the users as it helps them get products on a discounted rate, it is also beneficial for the sellers as their brands get listed on the app.

For all those who are considering a future in these apps, you must read this article thoroughly for full proof knowledge on such apps. This will also show you how one can make money out of this business and the way to go about it.

on demand deal app development

The Market Size of Daily Deal Apps and Industrial Statistics

These apps have grown exponentially over the years and have become one of the most used applications in the U.S. Let’s take a look at some statistics of the industry and the on-demand apps in the U.S.

  • The industry grew at an average rate of 12.5 percent from 2014 to 2019. The growth was steady and the annual revenue generated from the industry was $ 6 billion.
  • A total of 31 billion e-coupons had been used across the world in the year 2019 alone, which was almost double the number of what had been used in 2014 (16 billion).
  • According to a report, 55 percent of the users use their device to look up for an e-coupon like Fwrd promo code while shopping in a store.
  • The Daily Deals sector is expected to increase by $5.7 billion by 2021, representing a 5.7 percent annual growth rate. Various players are rushing into this sector, according to the report.

Take a look at the info graphic below for a better understanding of the statistics of the e-coupons industry worldwide:

What is the Daily Deal service?

A daily deal service is a marketplace that connects the users of the application with the merchants for lucrative deals. A seller or a merchant puts up his products and services on a discounted price on the application, which is then accessed by the users and the two strikes a deal if it suits the requirements of the buyer.

It is an eCommerce platform that puts up deals of one or more products for a certain period, mostly ranging between 24-36 hours. The business model has gained immense popularity over the years and consumers have become smart enough to purchase products using coupons available on these apps.

Retailers are allowed to put up their products on an app on a discounted rate offering a direct deal to their customers. The application or any other platform where the deal is mentioned receives a certain portion of the profits earned by a seller of the deal.

Business Model of a Daily Deal App

Since it is an application that allows the seller to post new deals every day, the business model of this application might vary from other applications in some of the other ways.

The e-commerce marketplace gives a platform to both the sellers and buyers to get connected and exchange products in return for money. Although, the sellers make money by selling their products, wondering what the daily deal app gets from it? Following are the ways these apps make money:

  1. Commission: These apps are a meeting place for sellers and buyers. It provides space to the sellers and in return, they have to give commission to the app according to the sales made by them with the help of the app. This is one of the major sources of income for the organization.
  2. Advertisements: Once an app becomes popular, other brands like to get their products or brand name endorsed on the same. This is when they buy space on the app and ask them to display their name at a certain location of their app.
  3. The deals that are made by the users and paid through the cards they have linked to the app, also are a major source of revenue for the on-demand daily deal apps. This is because these apps get some amount of the money earned through it.
  4. The revenue generated by the third parties also sums up to the earnings of the application.
  5. Earn money for selling products on behalf of the sellers.

Advantages of Daily Deal Apps

Advantages of Daily Deal Apps

Reach:

These apps provide an extended reach to the customers. One can reach to its valued consumers hassle-free. This is important especially for the organizations that are fairly new in the industry and don’t have a user base as much as the old companies have.

These apps offer you an entirely different market for your products and in little money, you can advertise all your products and services, along with advertising your brand.

Upfront costs:

These apps have minimal or no upfront costs. One can post their product deals on such apps without having to pay very little or nothing. Talking about the most popular daily deal mobile app like Groupon, it charges the seller half the amount of what they earn through the platform.

Saves time and money:

Since the entire process is quite seamless and transparent, these apps help users in saving ample time and money. They dot have to go from site to site or from store to store looking for something they want to purchase, looking for it at the best price. These apps are a one stop solution to such issues.

Discounted rates:

The users are enabled to distinguish between the pricing of the products on each platform and buy them at the best discounted rate. This helps them in saving their money.

cashbacks in deal application development

No extra expense:

One does not have to incur the money on advertising or promotions as this platform is everything in itself to promote your product and create a brand value for it on the platform.

Lowest rates:

A user is always on a lookout for the product at the lowest rates, and believe us nothing can provide as low rates of a product as these apps can.

Challenges Faced by the Daily Deal Apps

Things might seem hunky-dory from afar, but we must tell you know that these apps come with their own set of challenges. Listed below are some challenges faced by daily deal apps:

  • The first and foremost challenge to develop an app like this is to get a good user base to attract sellers. One cannot just simply start selling their deals on the app unless it is reputed and is known by a lot of people.
  • Apps like Groupon are among those daily deal apps that attract a large base of users and offer them products are prices that are even lower than the market rates. There is no parity in the sales of these products as the users on a daily deal app will get the same product at a lower price than the regular customers.
  • The rate of return is very low as users don’t want to spend over a certain amount for a deal. There might be a restriction on the amount one is willing to pay for a product or a service.
  • If you think that these apps will secure the future of your brand by promoting on the platform, then you are wrong. Such deals will end up hurting the goodwill of the brand in the market.
  • The deals made on the on-demand daily deal apps are not profitable because the sellers cannot keep much margin on the products that are put up for sale on the platform.

Why is Daily Deal Apps so Popular?

Everything and everyone has a reason to be popular! However, in the case of daily deal apps, there are several factors that contribute to its popularity and growth. Listing the reasons below:

  • These are the perfect platform for small scale businesses to sell their products at lucrative prices.
  • The conversions of deals on these apps are much higher as compared to any other retail applications.
  • Users are lured with the striking deals on the app.
  • If a company has a lot of inventory in its warehouse at the end of the season, they can put it up on a daily deal app and sell it online.
  • A company can keep selling its products on these apps over and over if users find their deals to be luring.
  • This platform majorly attracts the youth as the young demographic aged 18 to 34 is registered with these apps.
  • It helps in familiarizing a large group of customer base with your base, which might otherwise demand a lot of investment in the case of advertisement.

Top Five Daily Deal Apps

top daily deal apps in market

Groupon:

It is undoubtedly the greatest and the best on-demand daily deal app. Featuring more than several hundred deals each day, this company was founded in 2008 and was launched in the public in 2011. The app gives its subscribers access to all getaway deals, discounts on products, local and online deals. It can be used by iOS, Android and Windows users.

LivingSocial:

Another app that offers services like the popular Groupon app, this one also lures its users with attractive deals everyday. With the help of GPS, it offers and displays deals to users for products and services in proximity to their locations. The app is available to users in several countries and can be installed on iOS, Android and Windows.

Gilt:

Signing up on this app is free that offers deals to only its users and not to anyone else. It is a family of three apps, including Gilt, Gilt City and Jetsetter. While the former deals in luxury products, vacation deals and services for men, women and children, Gilt City works similar to Groupon and the latter is all about travel deal packages.

Fab:

Membership for this app is free of cost for the users. It deals in mostly the designer products of fashion and in food. It is available on both iOS and Android devices.

Ibotta:

It is one of the most proficient daily deals app for groceries. If one has a list of groceries, they must look up for deals of products on their list on Ibota before leaving from their house. Luck might have it that they might come across something that they require.

Different Types of Daily Deals App

Different-Types-of-Daily-Deals-App

Although all daily deal apps might look similar, there is a clear distinction in them and they might vary in some or the other way. Take a look at the different types of daily deal apps that one might come across:

Deal Apps:

This app offers a deal on products or services to the users on a daily basis. It renews the deals every day so that something or the other is proposed for purchase to all users each day. This helps the subscribers of the app in getting in touch with the sellers in a local market.

Coupon Apps:

These are full or digital coupons or the printable ones for restaurants and spas. The discount coupons can be booked on the apps and redeemed at the service place.

Coupon Apps in deal app

Membership Apps:

The last one of its kind lets the users attain access to the endless shopping and premium deals that are otherwise not open to everyone. One can buy products through the links provided in the apps and earn cashback on each purchase made by them.

General Features of Daily Deal Application

User Panel Merchant Panel Admin Panel
  • Sign Up/ Login
  • Invite Friends
  • Complete Profile
  • Browse store-specific/ Category-wise offers
  • Deals Listing
  • My favorites
  • Use Coupon Code
  • Share Deals on social media
  • Add Deals, Manage Deals
  • Manage Coupons
  • Subscribe
  • Favorite section
  • Acquired deal
  • Share Deals on social media
  • Track Status
  • Manage orders
  • Mail System
  • Redemption of coupons
  • Graphs, Statistics & dashboard
  • Manage Deals like new deals, active deals, approved deals, completed deals, rejected deals, expired deals
  • Manage Coupons, purchased & pending, used, purchased, expired
  • Categories & subcategories of deals
  • Manage Merchants/Consumers/Subscribers/Partners
  • Website Tracking, IP Tracking, Login/Logout Time tracking, Visitors Tracking, IP blocking
  • CMS based pages for FAQ, About Us, Contact Us
  • Graphs, Statistics and Dashboard
  • Share Deals on social media
  • Deal review & feedbacks

For User Panel

Signing up or login: This is the first and foremost feature in any daily deal app. It requires the users to sign up to the app and login in each time using their personal credentials.

Social media Integration: It is important for any app to make the signing up process to be less rigid and quick. Therefore, the best practice to keep it simple is through integrating social media log in, allowing the users logging in with their information in any of the social media accounts.

Browse offers category wise: This makes the search of a user very powerful. Allowing them to look up for a category or store of their choice, these apps will help them land on deals on products of their interest. One might not have to click on a lot of links to reach his ultimate destination.

Browse offers category wise in deal app development

View Deals: All users and subscribers should be able to get access to all categories and deals under them in any of the following categories:

  • Beauty
  • Dining
  • Shopping
  • Retail
  • Grocery

Inviting friends: This feature enables the users to invite their friends on the same platform to access the lucrative deals and make the most of it.

Apply Coupon: According to the convenience of the users, these coupon codes can be applied anytime during shopping either online or offline.

Apply Coupon in deal app

Favorites: This section is especially for the users who want to save a deal for later. They can mark any deal of their interest in my favourites category and access it at a later stage. However, it should be accessed in time, before it loses out on the validity.

For Merchant Panel

Coupon redemption: The billing system in the case of daily deal apps is transparent as the information of coupons redeemed is shared with the merchants. This gives them clarity on how many coupons have been used.

daily deal app development company

Managing orders: All deals issued and used are managed by the storekeepers for a better reference in the future and avoid any sort of confusion.

Alerting users on future deals through mail: This enables the merchants to send out messages and emails to the user and spreading awareness about the offers and deals thy are going to launch in the near future.

Tracking the status of deals used: Since the merchants have access to the status of the deals used by the users, it gives them a clear idea of which deals have been liked the most. Deals that get good response can be put up on the app anytime in the future again.

Tracking status of deals in deal app

Add and Manage deals: A store owner or a merchant has full authority over his page and managing his deals online. He can add or remove any deal at any given point of time. They are fully responsible for the management of the deals posted by them on the app.

Acquired deals: This feature allows the merchant to recognize the deals that are liked greatly by the users.

Admin Panel Features

Coupon management: Under this feature, the admin exercises the authority on analyzing information pertaining to the coupon, such as its code, store location and the category it belongs to.

coupon management feature deal app

Share deals: To give excessive coverage to a deal, the admin of the app can share the deals on a daily basis on social networking sites or other places that can help draw attention of the users.

Categories and subcategories of deals: The admin decides about the category and sub-category each product listen on the app belongs to.

CMS: It is the acronym of Customer Management System. Under this feature, all policies of the app, frequently asked questions, about us section and other buying guidelines are listed thoroughly by the admin.

Review deals and comments: Admin has full access to review the deals and read the comments of the users. This helps the admin make any necessary changes at any time.

CRM: Through this feature, the admin stays in touch with the customers and keep a tab on what is required by them and their expectations from the app.

Manage merchants: It is the responsibility to manage all the storekeepers and the merchants that are linked with the daily deals app who post deals each day.

Deal management: The admin strongly monitors all the dates and kinds of deals posted on the app by the merchants and storekeepers.

Deal management in deal app development

Advanced features of daily deal apps

Advanced-features-of-daily-deal-apps

Cloud Environment:

All the information pertaining to the users, deals, merchants, etc. is saved in a reliable manner in the backend. This information in safeguarded and managed for a seamless experience.

Price comparison:

Since these apps are known for offering a discount on products and services, it also gives one the advantage of comparing prices of all products and services listed under various categories on the app. This helps a user make better decision on where to buy the product from.

Payment gateway:

The integrated payment gateway makes the transactions cashless and the users have an option to make their payment through various payment gateways offered by the app. These payment gateways include the likes on debit/credit cards, net banking, e-wallets, among others.

Push notifications:

One of the most important features of any app, push notification is this in this scenario is extremely important to share information on upcoming and live deals. It also sends alerts to users on deals that are going to expire soon.

Gift Vouchers:

How would it feel if you get a gift voucher of something each time you make a purchase? Well, it will draw the attention of the users and they would like to come back to the app over and over again. This is a great feature to keep the users attracted to the app and bring them back for more purchases and deals.

Navigation and tracking:

This feature makes it easy for the users to access deals that are in close proximity to them. The apps are enabled with GPS which gives access to the user’s location and shows them deals of groceries, dining and shopping near them as deals of far off places is of no use to them.

Real-time Analytics:

This feature provides the real-time statistics of the app to the admin. They have a clear idea of how many deals are being availed through the app at one point of time. It helps the admin know the area from where the maximum deals were purchased and the likes and dislikes of people is also made clear through the analytics.

Tech Stack of a Daily Deal App

  • For Push Notifications: Bandwidth, Twilio
  • For SMS, Phone and Voice Verification: Nexmo
  • For Powerful Programming: GWT
  • Cloud Environment: AWS
  • For Data Management: Datastax
  • For payments: Braintree, PayPal
  • The universal Operating System: Debian
  • For everything related to emails: Mandrill
  • Database: Cassandra Database, HBase, MongoDB Database, Postgress, Mail Chimp Integration
  • Realtime Analytics: BigData, Hadoop, IBM, Spark, Apache Flink, Cisco

Development Process of a deal App

The development process of a daily deal app is very crucial and one might have to take out ample time in developing a deal app. There is a lot of hardwork, perseverance, time and money that goes in the making of such apps. Take a look at the development process of the app:

Analysis:

This is the first and foremost step where one has to analyse the space of daily deals along with the development process. All initial requirements of developing the app come under this step and one has to clearly specify the technical domain so that the rest of the process is smooth.

Design:

Then comes the selection of the design and the layout of the application. The developers clarify on the graphical aspects of the application. One should make sure to include informative and clear content along with graphical representation of images.

Development:

This is the ideal step where the developers can highlight on the features they want to include in the app. But before starting work on the project, the developers should make sure what kind of product they are looking for and if it will suit the requirements of the users or not.

QA:

It is the acronym for Quality Assurance. Once the app is developed, it goes through a thorough quality check wherein each feature and graphics are scrutinized keenly to see if everything is working properly. The app should be able to generate the interest of the users.

Deployment:

The final step after the quality analysis of the app comes to the great launch of the same. However, the app goes through the testing phase several times before this, as no developer would want to launch a half-baked application. It can be said that an app that goes through all the phases mentioned above will give other rival apps a run for their money.

Hire Mobile App Developer

Required Development team for App Development

  • UX/UI designers
  • Testing team
  • Project manager
  • Graphic designer
  • Back-end developers
  • iOS developers
  • Android developers

 Cost of Developing a Daily Deal Application

The exact cost of developing daily deal app cannot be analyzed, however, there are several factors that contribute to the cost of development of these apps.

  • If one is looking forward to launching a feature-rich app, it will cost a bomb to the developers as compared to an app that has the essential and important features.
  • The time taken to develop an app also contributes to the costing of the daily deal app.
  • Thirdly, the team hired to develop the app also have a huge role to play in the costing of the app. Wondering how? Well, if you hire permanent employees, you would have to provide them with office space and desktops to work on. They would also expect certain benefits and perks from employers. On the other hand, hiring freelancers will prove to be quite pocket friendly for the company.

Since a daily deal app is complex and boasts varied number of categories, the app development company charges somewhere between $70 to $250 per hour in U.S.

Conclusion

Deals and discounts on services and products have always lured the consumers. With the introduction of daily deal apps, it has become very convenient for the users to access deals and get anything at discounted rates. This is why these apps are on a rise and people making way for new such apps every day.

However, it is very important to keep in mind the factors one is launching this app for. Not only are these apps growing exponentially, but these have also been bridging the gaps between the merchants and the buyers.

Rahul Mathur

Rahul Mathur is the founder and managing director of ARKA Softwares, a company renowned for its outstanding mobile app development and web development solutions. Delivering high-end modern solutions all over the globe, Rahul takes pleasure in sharing his experiences and views on the latest technological trends.

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