Facebook Deals launches across Canada, Facebook testing social buying feature

Facebook Deals launched across Canada this week, allowing mobile users to check-in at featured businesses to receive discounts and promotions. Chapters Indigo, AMC Theatres, H&M, Joe Fresh and Telus are just some of the companies that have announced they will be participating in the beta launch of the program.

Last week Facebook also announced plans to begin testing a social buying feature called “Buy With Friends.” This feature will allow users to share purchases in their Facebook update stream. Users will be able to ‘unlock’ deals and then share these deals with their network. It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s answer to Groupon changes the group buying space, as it will push it to become even more social.

LivingSocial gives final stats for their record-breaking January… Look out Groupon

BusinessInsider reported on LivingSocial’s final numbers from their January Amazon promotion, and the numbers are impressive to say the least. According to LivingSocial, they added 5 million new subscribers in January, now totalling 20 million subscribers. The group buying site sold 1.19 million vouchers total for the Amazon deal, with 40% of deal purchases coming from shared links. There were 185,000 Facebook postings about the deal, and 100,000 of them were commented on. As of this week, 87% of all deals had been redeemed at a rate of about 50,000 per hour. LivingSocial’s sales were also up 65% the week after the deal, demonstrating that the success of the Amazon promotion has carried over and added to the sales of other deals offered on the site.

Groupon makes Hipster an acquisition offer

Hipster.com made waves during January when their pre-launch sign up went viral across North America. TechCrunch reported earlier this week that Groupon has been ‘aggresively’ trying to acquire the site for a figure below the 10$ million mark. Hipster, which hasn’t even formally launched yet is in the process of raising a seed round of investment for their locally driven Q&A website, which will be similar to Yelp or Quora. Groupon’s interest in Hipster could be because of the group buying company’s desire to expand towards increased localization, and  move into the consumer recommendation space.