8Coupons, the 2 ½ year old New York-based coupon aggregator, today announced that it has launched The DealBot, which crawls the Web for specific deals.
Deals found by The DealBot are added to 8Coupons’ geo-located “MoneyMap” showing deals and merchant locations. Users can weigh in on coupons by affirmatively voting on a section called “Is this deal real?” The overall capabilities of the offering appear to be similar to Center’d’s “The DealMap,” which launched last month.
Founder Landy Ung says that she expects the DealBot to add from 5 percent to 10 percent more offers to 8 Coupons, which currently boasts over a million coupons from over 300,000 merchants. The site has 1.5 million monthly users, she says.
Most of the site’s coupons come from partners such as ValPak, Money Mailer and RedPlum. 8Coupons’ technology enables national companies to detail local offers. That would have been helpful last week when I brought a Denver-based coupon from Einstein’s Bagels to Carlsbad, forcing the local manager to override her computer system).
Some are also sent in by users – some via mobile, which was the company’s initial orientation, and remains a channel. The site also aggregates “deal a day” offers from Groupon and 80 others, which Ung says has been very popular, driving a “spike in traffic.”. The site also works with between 30-50 shopper-bloggers, such as 89th and Broke, providing context to offers. Ung notes that “we send them a lot of traffic.”