A recent study by Hitwise and comScore reports growing popularity of daily deal sites and apps, especially during the holiday season. As consumers prefer to shop and get bargain deals online, the popularity of deal sites is going upward. One of the most popular deal site is Groupon. It alone accounts for 79 per cent of all US group-buying sites, and received 3,32,000 unique visitors on Black Friday.

According to the report, this Cyber Monday online sales were over $1 billion for the first time. Moreover, an overall rise of 14.3 per cent is also expected in US retail ecommerce holiday season sales. There are two main factors that urge consumers to shop for online holiday gifts- convenience of online shopping and saving money from deal sites. Eversave, a daily deal site conducted a survey last month and found that around 44.5% of online buyers consider shopping sites as a good source of procuring holiday gifts with bargains. Rest 42.5% reported that they would like to give these sites a chance for buying holiday gifts.

As the online shopping sites are experiencing an upward motion, they are also making several developments of their own in order to expand their scope. Groupon, one of the largest deal sites in US is getting benefit from Google’s interest in them. It has recently bought Ludic Labs, a company that delivers a local business advertising service for deals, coupons, and other offers.

On the other hand, eBay has purchased Milo.com for $75 million. While the company has not reported anything officially, the news was reported by two anonymous sources. As Milo.com specializes in tracking inventory in local stores, we also believe that this deal would be beneficial to eBay.

Finally, its Livingsocial that is gaining interest and got funding from the online store giant Amazon. An investment of $175 million by Amazon and $8 million has been done by Lightspeed Venture Partners to the Livingsocial, local leader in great deals. Along with this, it is also looking at its revenue to stack up to $500 million by 2011.