There is a new trend in town and it hitting the scene like lightening. It started with Groupon and was followed by hundreds of daily deal websites like Wicount, Dealify, Youdeal, Dealison and many others that popped up all over. And now, evolution! A natural move to the next stage of social buying: the daily deal aggregators.

Group buying websites, also known as social buying, daily deals or coupon buying sites have been around for about two years now with the most known site being "Groupon" which originated in America. Since then it has become a multi million dollar market. The basic methodology behind group buying is a high volume of sales in return for steep discounts, thus, by promising increased sales merchants agree to lower prices on their products which of courses makes them more attractive to online shoppers.

According to recent statistics, there are currently over 480 such websites around the world with 256 of them in America, 113 in Canada, 23 in China and 32 in South Africa.

So now, after two years since Groupon’s launch and many copycat sites following, where does the market go next? Well, although many reviewers of this market have argued that the method of increased discounts cannot sustain itself for long, others argue that the difficult economic times of 2010 to 2012 will only increase the reliability of online consumers on these discounted deals. Most of this unique methods reviewers agree that the fad will not stay forever, but the interesting question is how will things evolve from here?

According to David.B, the CEO of "Dealafrica", one of the more popular daily deal aggregator websites in South-Africa, the evolution is already here with thousands of South African Internet users already unsubscribing from the “regular” daily deal websites and moving to the larger aggregator websites instead. These aggregators do not sell products directly, but rather collect the offers available on all the other websites and centralized them in one location, saving the users time and effort in searching for the deals. Another advantage that the aggregator sites have, besides the large variety of deals, is the different filtering options which they provide and which allow users to easily navigate between all the deals and only see the ones they are interested in. Furthermore, websites like Dealafrica even offer users the chance to define their preferences and receive a daily email with only deals that they are interested in.

Due to this new trend, the number of aggregator websites has been growing constantly over the last few months and now there are at least five or more.

"Evidence" of the new trends success is obvious, says Dealafrica CEO, while mentioning that even he was surprised by the thousands of users who have registered since they launched in September 2011.

As with any trend, many people wonder whether there is financial value behind it? In this case, proof of the trends value can be found in the recent purchase of “Dealmap” - an international aggregator - by the Google a couple of months ago (2011).

For more information on group buying and social buying deals in South Africa or to enjoy Dealafrica’s free services, visit us now at http://www.dealafrica.co.za

Dealafrica is one of the most popular daily deal aggregator sites in South Africa, notoriously known for its clean and elegant layout, large variety of featured websites and its huge amount of filtering options. With Dealafrica you will save time and effort, and above all, you will never lose out on another deal. Did we mention that it’s free?