By Steve Shipside
As GrabOne Ireland launches into Northern Ireland with its Belfast based operation Classified Intelligence talked to Ruairi Doyle, General Manager at GrabOne Ireland about the new venture and about the daily deal market in general.

GrabOne started in New Zealand a little over a year ago and in that time has managed to carve itself a 65 per cent share of the New Zealand daily deal market, branch out into Australia (and now Ireland) and diversify into GrabOne Escapes and GrabOne Store. It’s also managed to move nearly 100,000 movie tickets, over 26,000 cupcakes, 39,000 massages and a million holes of golf all of which in their own way have helped bring it to the attention of Independent News & Media plc. Independent News & Media owns a number of online classifieds properties including niJobfinder.co.uk, niCarfinder.co.uk, and Propertynews.com. In May it went ahead and launched the Irish GrabOne as a joint venture with IdeaHQ Ltd.

APN, Independent News & Media’s Australian division is a shareholder of GrabOne in New Zealand so the link wasn’t hard to establish.
“We’ve been tracking the market since it exploded around this time last year and looking at routes to market,” notes Ruairi Doyle, “we looked at who could get us to where we wanted to go, spoke to GrabOne, and jumped on a plane. Pretty much the main reason was that we knew were were stepping into a crowded space so we were looking for something proven to be hot. We then found they were like minded people we felt we could work with and it has been a great success.”

Although GrabOne dubs itself “the leading collective buying website in Ireland” it faces stiff competition. In July Shane Hayes, CEO of Irish daily deal aggregation service Sift.ie observed that the Irish daily deals industry had seen 67 per cent increases since may to revenues of €2.1m with the number of deals up by a quarter in the same period.
Competing for that space are Groupon’s CityDeal, which Sift identified as the market leader with a near 50 per cent market share [since estimated to have dropped by ten per cent], followed by Livingsocial, PigsBack, and BoardsDeals meaning that GrabOne in its first month was positioned around fifth. “In our first month’s trading we took five per cent of the market”, recalls Doyle, “and now we’re up to about ten per cent.”

The obvious question is how to expand on that and steal share from the other players. “From a market point of view there are two strands: merchants and consumers”, says Doyle. “From a merchant point of view the proposition is very different to our rivals since we have a more consultative approach where [in some cases] they have a satellite team of sales reps reporting to a back office that could be in London or Germany. Plus our commission rates are more competitive and we provide a big value add when it comes to the marketing proposition thanks to the print portfolio and social media strategy.”

That’s particularly true when it comes to the launch of GrabOne into Northern Ireland with the unveiling of the Belfast site. “Northern Ireland has a good amount of money in the market but is less competitive that Dublin with only one or two other daily deal operators compared to Dublin’s thirty or forty. Plus we’re supported by the Belfast Telegraph which practically owns the media space there and in number one both online and offline.”

While the relationship with the newspapers is clearly key to GrabOne’s ambitions it is clear the daily deal operation is entirely separate. “We have our own employees with dedicated social media teams and copywriters” confirms Doyle. Ruairi himself was one of the few internal hires having been previously at Independent Digital. They also then brought over a sales manager from New Zealand, and Irishman called Aidan Hand and otherwise the team was recruited from scratch.

So aside from the latest launch in Belfast, how else is GrabOne looking to expand the business?
“This is an industry in which we can’t look further than three months just because it’s changing every day. That’s said we are being supported on both the platform and the business knowledge from Auckland and We have a lot in the pipeline, mainly around the marketing activity but we will also be adding some funky new features including Android, instant deals and merchant redemption. Plus having launched into Dublin, Cork, and Belfast we will be launching in two more regions in the next two months so yes, we are looking at more and more opportunities.”

Including GrabOne’s beyond the shores of Ireland and Northern Ireland? Doyle laughs, “right now my remit is the Irish market, but everything is possible.”