Since its founding in 1999, online deal discovery platform Slickdeals LLC has gradually pivoted its business model as technology and the online shopping experience have changed. 

The Santa Monica-based company is now driving growth forward with a sweeping shuffle across its executive leadership board, including the appointment of Neville Crawley as its chief executive at the beginning of the month. Crawley, who joined Slickdeals as president in January of last year, said he has a priority as the head of the company: to create a shopping experience users will visit every day.

Crawley is taking the place of Josh Meyers, who had been serving as chief executive of the company since 2013 and is staying on as executive chair. Along with the promotion of Crawley, Slickdeals has appointed Ken Leung, Elizabeth Simer and Josh Phillips as the company’s chief technology officer, chief business officer and chief product officer, respectively. Previously headquartered in West Hollywood, the company moved its office to Westwood on Jan. 9. 

Evolving with the internet

Slickdeals began in the early days of the internet as a newsletter in which founder Van Trac shared sales, promotions and discounted items that he found online for others to purchase, which latter blossomed into a forum-functional website with an online community of users sharing deals with one another. Slickdeals has active partnerships with brands including Walmart Inc., Adidas AG, Best Buy Co. Inc., Dell Inc., eBay Inc., Macy’s, Recreation Equipment Inc. and Sam’s West Inc., but Crawley said that the platform’s most valuable source of content comes from its users.

“Now it’s more of a marketplace, but I think the throughline through the whole (company), and the thing that’s made Slickdeals successful and is the thing we’re building on, is its community,” Crawley said. “Once you get a community around a topic, it tends to be very enduring and grow and thrive over time. So, although the outside has changed to some extent, the community is still the absolute core.”

Users can find deals for apparel, fragrances and home goods, as well as miscellaneous products such as DVDs, sports equipment, televisions, vacation packages, dry food items, hardware tools and office supplies.

Market for deals

The concept of creating a platform or web extension for deal discovery is popular within the e-commerce market, with coupon-finding companies like Texas-based RetailMeNotInc. and downtown-based Honey Science LLC representing big names in the space. A spokesperson for PayPal Holdings Inc., which acquired Honey in 2020, said that rising costs and inflation have increased the importance of discount discovery as shoppers are prioritizing shopping “smart.”

But Crawley said that Slickdeals stands apart from those competitors because of how it leads consumers to make purchases. He said that within e-commerce, there are “up-funnel” companies and “down-funnel” companies. Up-funnel companies like Slickdeals, he stressed, step in at the beginning of consumer’s purchase journey to help them find a deal on a product they had not previously discovered or had not initially set out to purchase. He classified down-funnel companies as stepping in at the end of a customer’s purchase journey – when they are already likely to buy something – and offering a coupon code or cashback reward, adding that that market is much more crowded.

“There’s lots of people offering coupon extensions or cashback, but the upper funnel of helping you discover something you maybe half knew you needed … is what we’ve really homed in on, particularly in the last year, and is something that we’re really unique at,” Crawley said. “It’s also really valuable to merchants because they get customers they wouldn’t have normally had, or can get them to try something new. We think the up-funnel discovery is actually a really open space.”

Simer said that, in addition to introducing consumers to new product, the company also offers an aggregated location of different companies’ sales to streamline the purchase process.

“For any given purchase decision, there are countless options on brands, models and price points,” Simer said. “If a consumer wants to make sure they are getting the best deal, they sift through voluminous reviews on numerous sites trying to find signal in the noise. While this can be a distraction to our community today, we see this as the big opportunity for the next generation of Slickdeals.”

Growth and advertising

Slickdeals said that its revenue grew 10% a year from 2018 to 2022 and has grown its team in that time to 157 employees, from 95 in 2018. In 2018, the company was acquired by Hearst Corp. and the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in a deal valued at $500 million, according to Bloomberg LP. To date, Slickdeals said it has saved shoppers $10 billion in deals.

Crawley said that the bulk of its revenue comes from a combination of advertising on its website, an affiliate commission from purchases made by users and from merchants paying Slickdeals to promote a specific deal or product on the platform. The platform is free to users.

For a platform focused on offering products to users, there is the matter of how a company can identify what category or item type a user will be most interested in. Tracking user data has become more difficult for many companies over the last few years, particularly since Apple Inc. enforced data privacy regulations on its Identifier for Advertisers system, or IDFA, in 2021. IDFA gives users anonymous IDs that provide advertisers with information on their activity, and that granular data allows for more personalized marketing content. IDFA became an opt-in feature with the release of iOS 14.5 in 2021, which was crippling for advertisers and their ability to monetize digital activity. 

In addition to this, the digital advertising market declined last year when advertisers reduced their spending after a pandemic-led spree. This affected revenue streams for many companies, including Santa Monica-based Snap Inc.

Crawley acknowledged this shift in the digital advertising industry over the last few years and the decline in average ad rates, but said that Slickdeals’ business model hadn’t been heavily impacted by increased data-privacy restrictions. He added that people can use Slickdeals anonymously without creating an account, though the company is able to give more targeted and personalized deal recommendations if users do create an account.

Slickdeals is specifically working to transform its more than 12 million monthly active users – up from 10 million in 2018 – into daily active users with registered accounts. Daily active user count is often used as a metric of a platform’s level of engagement and can be highly monetizable. He said that Slickdeals currently has about a 40% conversion rate of monthly active users to daily active users.

“(The question is), ‘how do we make it so compelling that people will visit us every day?’” Crawley said. “When we get people engaged and to start building that use habit, we become a really meaningful part of someone’s life … we think that, if we get that right, we have a 10-times bigger business to build over the coming years.”

He said that the key factors in this include having a more modern interface – Slickdeals has both a desktop interface and a mobile app – and having enough new items on the platform to give users new offerings every day. Gathering a large selection of new, rotating deal recommendations comes from both user-generated findings that are posted to the platform as well as a still-developing algorithm that can find new deals and accurately recommend posts to users. 

“We want to hear back from users that they’re having a joyful experience, they’re discovering things and we’re helping them enjoy their lives and get the most value from purchases,” Crawley said. “Obviously, what we want to hear from merchants on the marketplace side is that they’re getting new customers and people are discovering new things from them that they wouldn’t have otherwise discovered … 

“We have a community that is trusted and authentic and adding value to each other so we’re really just focused on being the best place on the internet and on your phone to come check out deals that interest you every day.”