The "daily deals" model seems to depend on a few things to be successful; if any of these doesn't work, then the model is in trouble: 1. It has to offer someth

The "daily deals" model seems to depend on a few things to be successful; if any of these doesn't work, then the model is in trouble: 1. It has to offer something compelling. The daily deal is asking a potential customer to commit now to buying something; if the customer could spend just a little bit more to get that thing at their leisure (or if they don't really care whether they get that thing or not), then they will. 2. So it depends on a supplier making an offer that is substantially better than any offer they're making anywhere else. This is bad for suppliers, as it can weaken their relationships with long-time distributors. 3. So the supplier will want to see the daily deals system reaching a market that they couldn't otherwise reach -- maybe a particular demographic, or a very large advertising-adverse market, or a lucrative and otherwise impenetrable local market. 4. And that market has to have disposable income to spend on things they don't really need, and the desire to do so. Unfortunately, the various goals here are all mis-aligned. You can't really expect the same market to buy something from you every single day, especially if you're offering high-ticket items, so you can never reliably expect to extract purchases from more than a percentage point or two of your market. This is not at all attractive to your suppliers, who will turn to other forms of distribution that might be more lucrative -- they could for example just run a sale on their own site, get picked up by a deal aggregator like dealnews.com, sell items for slightly more than they would have otherwise, and maybe the customer will buy something else while they're there. So then the daily deals sites become a clearinghouse for stuff that suppliers can't sell elsewhere, and that cheapens the daily deal site in the eyes of its market. (Woot.) I think a better, more reasonable model would be an "irregular deals" site -- a site that waited until they got some really amazing offer from a supplier, and then blasted that out to this huge network they built up. Because it's irregular, they'd get more of the market purchasing each time, and because the deal site is focusing exclusively on high quality offers, they'd be able to build up a much larger, more committed market.