Screenwerk: Yelp to Scale Back Deals

Quoted:

According to a  report  in Bloomberg Yelp is scaling back on the sales resources devoted to selling Yelp Deals.

"Rather than offer more and more deals of inherently declining quality to more and more folks over time, we want to make sure we're only providing good, quality opportunities," Vince Sollitto, vice president of corporate communications, said in an interview. "While we think the deals business is a good one, it has never been a core focus of our offering."

Here's an anecdote in a Bloomberg piece that sums up some of what's going on with merchants and all the sales calls they're receiving:

Merchants say that participating in the deals often leads to unsolicited calls from other coupon sites. After Kiebpoli Calnek ran a Yelp Deal advertising 50 percent off an aerial performance class in July, she began receiving calls from representatives of Groupon, LivingSocial and other deal sites every day.

"They send me e-mails, they call me, they call me again," said Calnek, who is based in Brooklyn, New York. "I told them, ‘I'm burnt out from this deal. I have 500 new clients. Why would I want to do another one?'"

Are we hitting a wall in daily deal sites?