Daily deals refer to a selling technique in eCommerce where a product is offered for a limited time at a discount, typically for a period of 24 hours.

The goal of the daily deal is to instill a sense of urgency in your customer, as well as to increase traffic to your website or product listing by promoting discussion and a sense of excitement amongst your social following - and, obviously, to increase sales.

How Daily Deals Work for eCommerce Merchants

Let’s first go into how daily deals work for your typical eCommerce retailer.

You’re asked to set aside a certain amount of product by one of your marketplaces for a daily deal, or a flash sale site contacts you and asks you to set aside a predetermined quantity for their website.

There are really two main ways that eCommerce retailers handle this request; the first entails pulling all requested inventory off your shelves into a stack, manually removing the quantities from each online marketplace so you don’t have out of stock, and then selling from the stack now in the middle of your warehouse. Once the sale’s over, it’s your unhappy task to count all remaining quantities, put those quantities back up and available for sale on each of your marketplaces, and relocate them to their appropriate space or shelf in your warehouse.

The second way that retailers typically handle a daily deal is by physically taping off the appropriate section(s) in your warehouse, so at least you’re not physically reallocating a bunch of product - but you still have to take all your quantities down off of all your marketplaces, count them again, and then put them back up after the sale. No matter how you slice it, both of those processes are tedious and obnoxious.

Benefits of Using SkuVault to Help with Daily Deals

Now let’s take a look at how daily deals work for your typical eCommerce retailer on SkuVault.

You’re asked to set aside a certain amount of product by one of your marketplaces for a daily deal, or a flash sale site contacts you and asks you to set aside a predetermined quantity for their website. You utilize SkuVault’s Holds feature to place a temporary hold on a certain quantity of a certain SKU(s), set the expiration date and time of the sale, and, voila! Daily deal, accomplished.

When your products are in SkuVault’s hold, those quantities are automatically taken off of all your online marketplaces via your integrated channel. At the date and time of the sale’s expiration, all the remaining quantities that didn’t sell in the daily deal are automatically put back online - no need to recount, re-list, or pointlessly move product around your warehouse.

Now, when an order comes in from Groupon, for example, you can use a custom remove transaction to simultaneously remove the stipulated quantity from both holds, and from your inventory count, and ship it straight to your waiting customer.