A Secondary Market for Group Deals

Lifesta The Lifesta home page.

Sites offering group deals like Groupon and Living Social seem relatively new. But a secondary market for the deals has already popped up.

On the four-month-old site Lifesta, people who bought group deals they didn’t use and no longer want can sell the unused deals to those who do want them.

The idea for the site came to the founders Yael Gavish, a former McKinsey & Company project manager, and Eran Davidov, a former Sun Microsystems director of engineering, while they were brainstorming possible business ideas.

“Yael said, ‘Why don’t we do a secondary market for Groupons?’ as a joke and I said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea. Let’s think about it,’” Mr. Davidov said.

Ms. Gavish said that they realized that they had missed a lot of the deals. “And we figured that people who don’t use them would want to sell them. So we said, ‘Why don’t we merge both sides and create this marketplace?’”

The Lifesta site doesn’t charge users anything for listing their unused deals and lets sellers set the prices they want. But when a deal is sold, the site collects 99 cents plus 8 percent of the sales price from the seller. Once buyers pay, meanwhile, they can instantly access the coupon and receive a 60-day money-back guarantee if the coupon turns out to be invalid.

So far, about 700 deals have been posted for sale on the site, and the founders say they are looking into working with deal sites to sell their unused inventory as well. Lifesta is also not the only site trying to be the secondary market for the group deals. Another, for instance, is called CoupRecoup.

What group buying deals have you regretted buying, if any?