GROUPON & LIVING SOCIAL CAUGHT INFLATING PRICES TO SHOW BIGGER DISCOUNT

Groupon and LivingSocial succeed because consumers perceive them as great deals. But is that true?

Thumbtack.com called 10 vendors offering daily deals (five from Groupon and five from LivingSocial) and found eight instances where they were quoted a price over the phone that was cheaper than the advertised regular price being offered. All five of Groupon's prices were higher than the same merchant's price when called, and three of the LivingSocial ones were.

Some of the most egregious examples from the Thumbtack.com post:

• On August 24, 2011, Groupon offered carpet cleaning for a 200 sq. ft. room in San Francisco for $45, a discount of 78% from the regular price of $200. The price we were quoted? $160 for 300 sq. ft. of carpet cleaning, or $0.53 per sq. ft. At $0.53 per sq. ft., the cleaning for a 200 sq. ft room would cost $106.
• On September 19, 2011, Groupon offered two hours of home cleaning services in Phoenix for $49, a discount of 67% from the regular price of $150.  The non-discounted price for the cleaning advertised by Groupon? $150. The price we were quoted for two hours of home cleaning? $80.

MICROSOFT LAUNCHES BING DEALS

Microsoft announced and launched a new deals website on Friday tied to its growing Bing suite of services. Bing Deals is a shopping site that compiles specials from GroupOn, Target, LivingSocial, Nordstrom and others. “Instead of building another program, we’re harnessing deals from major providers and retailers,” said Bing senior director Lisa Gurry. Microsoft’s Bing Deals offers more than 200,000 specials across the United States and, as a deal aggregator, it should eliminate the need to sign up for email alerts from multiple coupon-based services. Just like competing options, Microsoft will offer daily specials that will be accessible from its desktop website located at http://bing.com/deals and from mobile devices.

FACEBOOK SHELVES "FACEBOOK DEALS"

Facebook has decided to shelve its Facebook Deals product, a service that was launched to compete with other coupon service providers such as Groupon and LivingSocial. “After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” Facebook told Reuters. “We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.” Facebook will instead focus on Pages, Sponsored Stories and its Ads product. Facebook announced Deals in November and began testing the service in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. It partnered with aDealio, Gilt City, HomeRun, kgb deals, OpenTable, Plum District, PopSugar City, ReachLocal, Tippr, viagogo and zozi to power the service.

AT&T LAUNCHES GROUPON COMPETITOR

Yellow Pages, a subsidiary of AT&T, is launching its own Deals platform that will compete with Groupon and other bargain services, Bloomberg is reporting. The service is live now on YellowPages.com, and AT&T is offering new customers a $10 credit towards their first “Deal of the Day” purchase, provided that you sign up before May 22nd.

The carrier says that its Yellow Pages Deals service will be available in Atlanta, Dallas/Forth Worth, and Los Angeles to start, although it will be deployed to more cities in the future. AT&T could have the upper hand among mobile users, as it typically installs a default Yellow Pages application on most of its phones. However, it’s unclear if it will build the Deals service directly into mobile apps, or if it will only be an online/e-mail offering.

BING TO TAKE ON GROUPON AND LIVINGSOCIAL

Microsoft's Bing has announced it will be launching Bing Daily Deals. Microsoft will be partnering with Dealmap to bring 200,000 deals from 14,000 cities throughout the United States to Bing's desktop and mobile versions.

On the mobile version of Bing, Bing Deals will be accessed through a dedicated “Deals” tab, while on the desktop, deals will be presented as a regular part of search results.

Unfortunately, you can’t specify the types of deals you’d like to receive, since all deals are based strictly upon location. However, what you lack in specificity, you make up for in volume, since Dealmap — upon which Bing Deals is based — is a huge aggregator of deals from other sites.

WOOT OFF!

We got us a Woot Off!  Hit up Woot.com for some good deals

CYBER MONDAY DEALS ROUNDUP

It's Cyber Monday - the online equivelent of Black Friday shopping. Below is a roundup of some of the best deals out in ether.

Cameras

Nikon Coolpix 12.1MP S70 slim digital camera — $159 @ Best Buy
Kodak EasyShare M590 slim digital camera — $114 @ Amazon
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 micro-4/3rds digital camera — $399 @ Amazon

Computers

HP Pavilion desktop AMD quad-core, 8GB, 1TB – $629 @ HP
HP Pavilion dv6t notebook Intel Core i3, 6GB, 500GB — $599 @ HP
CyberpowerPC Intel Core i5, 4GB, 1TB, 1GB ATI GPU — $599 @ Newegg
iBuyPower Intel Core i3, 4Gb, 1TB, 512MB ATI GPU — $499 @ Newegg
Dell Zino HD nettop AMD dual-core, 3GB, Blu-ray — $349 @ Dell

Computer Accessories

8GB Kingston flash drive — $9.95 @ Buy.com
2TB Seagate HDD — $69.99 @ Newegg
Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless Router — $29.99 @ Newegg
OCZ 240GB SSD — $399 @ Newegg
HP Deskjet D2680 — $29.99 @ HP
Kingston 64GB SSD — $89.95 AR @ Buy.com

Gadgets

Refurb 3G Barnes & Noble Nook ereader — $99.99 @ Buy.com
Brother Labeler — $9.99 @ Buy.com
Free Insignia GPS with purchase of iPod touch — @ Best Buy
Xbox 360 Live Bundle — $249 @ Walmart
Free Shipping at ThinkGeek
30-70% off Watchismo Watches
20% of ScottEVest gear with the coupon code CYBER20

Thanks to TechCrunch for compiling this list!