Facebook not proceeding with Group Buying?

With Facebook’s huge global reach and launch of Facebook Deals, it has been anticipated that Facebook would roll out their own Group Buying platform.

Instead of heading down the ‘deal a day’ route, similar to GroupOn, Living Social etc it looks like Facebook is aligning more to Geolocation services (think Foursqaure, Gowalla) whereby users can discover local deals around them.

This is known as ‘Check-in Deals’, whereby the users needs to use a mobile device to take advantage of finding any deals/specials.

On Friday Facebook released a statement saying they would be retiring their Group Buying deals product, which was available to select cities in the USA.

This is good news for GroupOn, Living Social, Spreets, Cudo etc as they have one less competitor in the space, and with Facebook’s sheer size could have outdone them all.

It seems Facebook will concentrate on local deals, which will compete with the Google Places products.

Surely Facebook is reconsidering their whole deals platform as a new innovative product in this space, with Facebook’s reach could be a big revenue opportunity. I personally think Facebook could have great success in the Group Buying space, but no doubt their great minds are thinking about the best way to offer these products.

I anticipate we will be seeing a lot more in the deals space from Facebook soon.