Product Review: BlastJa.com – a deal site for Jamaicans

Daily Deals sites are all the range in North America. These sites drive an enormous amount of walk-in traffic to offline stores by offering huge discounts (typically 50%) to online users who redeem these discounts at the store. A few local entrepreneurs have ventured down this road before with very little success, however in BlastJa there seems to be someone who is finally doing it right.

Blast is a local deals website run by Lauren McClure and Alex Morrissey (of JamaicansMusic fame). For one, they have already enlisted a good compliment of vendors, from Usain Bolt’s Tracks & Records to RIPT Gym. Second, they are requiring a minimum number of people for deals to become active and this is exactly how Groupon made it’s name. Because getting vendors is so important, it is also important to be known and seen. To this end Blast has done a very good job so far. They had a article about Blast in the Business Observer and they followed that up with a full fledged launch at Track’s & Records complete with demonstrations of how Blast will work. The launch was packed with business people and consumers alike.

 

Jamaica is no stranger to online shopping, auction and classified sites have been around for years but we have yet to see a truly successful daily deals site. As mentioned this is not the first attempt:

IrieSocial – A daily deals sited invested by Asafa Powell. At the time of the this post the site was not even up.

CariDeals – Although carrying a Caribbean like name, the business was definitely Jamaican. This one showed some promise as it was even endorsed by Scotiabank Jamaica. Its site is also not up and triggered an alert from my anti-virus software. Not good.

There are some serious challenges that face such a business, which might explain the lack of success to date:

1. Offline work – Such a business requires a lot of offline ground work to get physical stores to give you deals.
2. Discounts – The offer really isn’t attractive enough unless the deals are close to 50% discount. Trying to get local vendors to give that up on a consistent basis is going to take some serious work.
3. Business model (credit card)  – The model requires that the site collects the actual payments and then pays the store after. Not sure if enough people will buy online to drive enough traffic to the store. Not sure if vendors will want to wait for you to pay them.
4. Business model (no credit card) – If the site is not going to collect payments, then trying to get paid by the vendors in Jamaica is going to be a massive undertaking. Jamaican businesses are some of the hardest people to collect from.
5. Business model (25%) – GroupOn and other deal sites typically split the remaining 50% after the discount. Once again, trying to get Jamaican vendors to (1) discount it 50% then (2) Give you 25% and (3) only keep 25% of the item price for themselves… is the challenge of a lifetime.

You can pitch “treat it as a marketing cost” all you want, but I’m not sure you’ll get enough Jamaican vendors willing to offer that much of a discount and lose money. Then can you get enough of them to secure good deals on a consistent basis? It’s going to be hard.

Conclusion
All of this said, I do believe that BlastJa has the best chance of all to succeed. It will be extremely challenging, but if it wasn’t a challenge then everybody would be doing it. Should they get enough vendors with some real deals, then I am sure those stores will see serious crowds. And if it works for those stores then others will follow. The key will be in getting vendors and getting paid from vendors. Let’s wish them well.

About the Author: Chad Cunningham is the owner of JamDeal, the online auction marketplace of Jamaica. JamDeal is Jamaica’s largest online shopping site with categories ranging from art, fashion and clothing, computers and laptops, and cars for sale. He has been in the local internet industry for over 10 years.