Facebook Cancels Social Deals

Anne Garcia - August 31, 2011

Since launching Facebook Deals four months ago, the social network has decided to exit the online daily deal business with industry-competitors like Groupon and Living Social, in the near future. Facebook emailed the following statement to Reuters:

“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks. 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 best to serve local businesses.”

Facebook says that they are planning to keep Check-In Deals, which works differently than Facebook Deals. Check-in Deals are based on people’s Facebook check-ins when they visit your business. You can run check-in deals across multiple store locations, and create different types of deals to achieve different business goals.

Check-In Deals is currently available to all businesses in the United States and Japan and is free to create, although the product, its availability and pricing are subject to change in the future. 

Facebook Social Deals required businesses to have a Facebook page and allowed the merchants to offer deals that didn’t specifically offer a percentage-based discount. In addition, Social Deals was only open to five cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco.