TimesDeal.com offers free deals

This move is a result of both purposeful and accidental learnings, which have resulted in a change of the TimesDeal business model.

TimesDeal.com, the group buying portal from Times Internet, now offers deals free of cost. Earlier, it charged users 20 to 40 per cent of the deal value upfront.

With this move, TimesDeal has changed its business model, moving away from the traditional revenue model similar to its competitors such as Snapdeal.

The decision has been made after both, purposeful and accidental learnings. In February, TimesDeal ran a Valentine's Day promotion and for the promotion all deals were made free. As a result, there was a 10 times increase in consumption. This drove the internal conviction for a free product.

Satyan Gajwani, chief executive officer, Times Internet, says, "After the Valentine's Day's free promotion, we knew we had tapped into some significant latent demand in the market for free deals. We started working on the free product immediately after that. Last week, a promotional code was accidentally released and it spread on the internet. TimesDeal experienced over 100,000 transactions, a dramatic increase in deal consumption before the code was withdrawn. While TimesDeal lost revenues from the mistake, it helped further validate our belief in a free deals platform just as we were about to launch it."

TimesDeal will renovate its user interface to focus more intensely on the discovery of deals, to make the process of consuming a deal faster and simpler and also allow users to avail more targeted and personalised options for their areas of interest.