The daily deals people actually buy

This post comes from Seth Fiegermanat partner site MainStreet.

Of the countless daily deals out there, consumers are apparently most drawn to offers for discounted massages.

Shoppers bought 154,085 vouchers for massages in the second quarter of this year from LivingSocial.com, one of the leading daily deal services, making this the most successful deal category of any on the site by far. Some of the other extremely popular deals included yoga (92,242 vouchers bought) and manicures (72,500 vouchers bought), showing just how eager consumers are to find ways to pamper themselves for less.

Aside from beauty and fitness products, LivingSocial's data show that consumers also snatched up hundreds of thousands of vouchers for food products, with the most popular being deals for Mexican restaurants (107,159 vouchers bought) and pizzerias (88,624 vouchers bought). Post continues after video.

In total, LivingSocial sold more than 4 million vouchers between April and June of this year. Like Groupon and other daily deal sites, LivingSocial emails users city-specific deals each day that must be snatched up in a narrow window of time and paid for upfront to be redeemed later.

With that in mind, one might argue that the popularity of each deal category on this list may have as much to do with the level of the discount and how often LivingSocial promotes it as with users' taste for the type of deal in question. While LivingSocial's data do not offer any indication of how prices affected the deals offered, it does possibly refute the latter point about the number of deals offered in each category influencing the number of vouchers that are sold.

As any daily deal subscriber has no doubt noticed, Groupon and LivingSocial push out teeth whitening and laser hair removal deals constantly, yet just 20,143 laser hair removal vouchers and 14,408 teeth whitening vouchers were taken during the quarter. Combined, that means consumers bought a fifth as many vouchers in these two categories as they did with massages, despite all the promotion hair and teeth offers get.

Who knows? Perhaps by being bombarding with a never-ending series of offers for 75% off teeth whitening, consumers have simply become desensitized to these deals altogether.

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