Dealmates? What’s the deal?

I rarely blog about things like this but I think it is funny.

I stum­ble upon this group buy­ing site that seems to be a hot topic right now for bar­gain hunters. Group buy­ing is basi­cally har­ness­ing the inter­net and buy­ing things from a mer­chant with huge dis­counts. It is also another way of mar­ket­ing for the mer­chant for a very low fee. It is a three wins kinda sit­u­a­tion where every­one gets a good deal out of it.

Back to the topic of what I was gonna blog about.

It was this par­tic­u­lar Face­book advert that I was look­ing at. About this one par­tic­u­lar group buy­ing site named Deal­mates. While the name is inter­est­ing, but what inter­est me is they are throw­ing RM100k on a mar­ket­ing cam­paign, that is going to make the com­pany look cheap, or the peo­ple that believe that they are actu­ally giv­ing out the RM100k look stupid.

Let’s put it in a very sim­ple way of look­ing at things.

Do they have the money? Prob­a­bly. Since they have recently signed some deal with Intel Cap, which in no where did I see any fig­ures men­tioned. Dodgy.

Are they going to give out the money? Prob­a­bly not. The ‘con­test’ is based on a lot­tery sys­tem. There are no men­tion of the mechan­ics of how the win­ning per­son is going to be choosen. The biggest issue would be, it needs to be tipped by 100k users as well.

Look­ing at the rate of how the num­bers are grow­ing, I do not think it will reach the tip­ping point. In fact, I do not even think it will reach 1/4 of the tip­ping point.

So what are they try­ing to do? Do they really have the real money to actu­ally do adver­tis­ing? I doubt.

So I dug fur­ther. I signed up, and I was dis­gusted by how I was greeted by “Hi friend” in an email from Dealmates.

“Hi Friend”?

Seri­ously?

No won­der it went into my spam mail.

Then, the list was called “kualalumpur”, and it as signed off by a dude called Joshua Wong.

So I went fur­ther to find out who is this Joshua Wong.

It turns out to be a very well con­nected china man that relates back to Catcha, and iProp­erty. Why would I want to call him a china man when I know so lit­tle about a per­son? Well, china man com­pa­nies usu­ally like to put their name on every­thing they own, in this case, the mail­ing list of “kualalumpur”.

What I dis­like is how you have made me fill up the form, by sign­ing up to your site and then you call me your friend. Can’t accept that.

The web­site loads fine, but it felt slug­gish even with my brand new Mac­book Pro that I have bought. The only rea­son for that is bad cod­ings, and hell load of unnec­es­sary wid­gets. Need or not? What’s with that lazy blueish web­site that is sta­tic at the back­ground? This is so year 2000.

I saw this Brotzeit deal that was going on, and I thought it was a good deal and since I will be back for F1 in Sin­ga­pore, I might as well drop by to see mom and dad and stay over for a week or so. So I paid with my credit card, and wanted to share it out to Twitter.

All I got was RED. Red because the char­ac­ter limits.

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What is inter­est­ing also is that, their RM100k deal is also appear­ing on my blog. Which I am won­der­ing what kinda key­words are they tar­get­ting, and how much cpc are they paying.

I have suc­cess­fully run so many dot com com­pa­nies, and I never needed more than 50k to get the kinda traf­fic that I want. Of course, as much as I see the inten­tions of dri­ving traf­fic, I also see that they are being very cheap. Cheap in a way that they are doing it by not hav­ing any money, and they are doing it for free. Any mer­chants or buy­ers or who­ever should just totally avoid deal­ing with Deal­mates, or whatever.

On the back­end, they are run­ning on .NET. With known URL like admin.dealmates.com.my. Interesting.

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So I asked a few Malaysian friends who so hap­pened are also fans of their Face­book page. Non of them think that it will be tipped, and they also think that Deal­mates just do not have that edge to stand out.

What else can I say.

Group buy­ing is all about har­ness­ing the power of the inter­net and con­nect­ing peo­ple into buy­ing a cer­tain prod­uct or ser­vice. In this very sce­nario, we use social media like Twit­ter and Face­book to drive the traf­fic and the peo­ple; When I see a deal that I like, I tweet it just like how I tweet news and things that I like. How­ever, because of bad web cod­ings or what­ever, I can’t tweet. What’s the point of hav­ing a tweet but­ton then?

Sec­ondly, they have a Twit­ter account. Good idea, pro­mote the deals via twit­ter. How­ever, they are just using their twit­ter account to fur­ther pro­mote deals, and instead of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with poten­tial cus­tomers, or what­ever. No won­der they have so lit­tle followers.

Their Face­book replies to cus­tomer is very idi­otic as well. If I have reach through you from a social media plat­form, with my name clearly dis­played, I’d expect you to address me by my name, instead of call­ing me Dear Sir.

So, social media you tak boleh, cus­tomer ser­vice you tak boleh, web site tak boleh, what else can you do?

Update: I just check on Deal­mates page again. I some­times won­der­ing if they indeed hired a pho­tog­ra­pher (They stated that they are hir­ing). Some of the pho­tos look pretty bad, some are decent and some are just pure nice.

Update 2: I called the num­ber on their web­site only to be answered by a china man, who speaks bro­ken eng­lish and oic. Which con­firm my the­ory about Joshua Wong.

Update 3: Their SEO is bad, web cod­ing is bad, but judg­ing from Joshua Wong LinkedIn, I won’t be sur­prised it’s so 2000.

While I might not be a group buy­ing site, but hav­ing 100k uniques’ a day on my blog, I think I can do bet­ter than you.