Yipit launches Yipit Nation

The new feature displays nationwide deals in a wide range of different categories

Yipit just upped the ante on social shopping.  On Wednesday, the group-deal site unveiled its newest feature: Yipit Nation.  The feature aggregates the many nationwide deal sites across a range of different categories into one location, so that instead of signing up for Groupon and LivingSocial for your local deals, Lot18 for your wine deals, and Gilt Groupe for your clothes, you can just log into Yipit to browse through your customized selection of deals in one sitting.

New and existing Yipit subscribers simply sign up and tailor their preferences to receive deals from specific categories of interest, such as men’s and women’s fashion, electronics, home décor, wine, coffee and teas, items for kids and babies, holiday items, travel, pets, and more. 

For example, I signed up and my selection of deals includes 50% off wine and accessories from Winery Insider, 50% off build-your-own chocolate bars from Chocomize (don’t judge me), and 67% off of a six-month supply of at-home teeth whitening kits.  I can’t help but think if I didn’t get the wine and chocolate deals, I wouldn’t need the teeth whitening deal.

The new feature launched right after Yahoo’s announcement yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it will be getting into the local deal space by partnering with 20 daily deal sites, including Groupon, BloomSpot, Coupons.com, Gilt City, and ValPak to provide local deals for Yahoo users.  The company has yet to say how they plan to display those deals, but Yahoo execs told reporters from the New York Times that it is likely that deals will be displayed on the Yahoo homepage and will be custom-tailored to reflect popular deals in the user’s location. 

Yipit could not be reached for comment, but co-founder Vinicius Vacanti earlier told CNET that he is surprised by Yahoo’s limited number of partners.  “Yipit currently aggregates over 130 daily deal services creating a much more comprehensive experience. If users rely on Yahoo for their daily deals, they will be missing out on 80 percent of the deals,” said Vacanti.  He added that the site’s new nationwide deals feature will be very attractive to big retailers.  "Magazines, vertical Web sites, TV shows, and other big media brands with a large nationwide audience are eager to get into the daily deal space and will be focusing on nationwide deals rather than local deals.”

This is not the first time a daily deal site like Yipit has tried its hand at nationwide deals.  In August, Groupon attempted its first ever nationwide deal, offering $25 off of any $50 purchase at the Gap.  The deal was so popular that it crashed Groupon’s servers for a brief period.  Some 400,000 coupons were sold, bringing in roughly $11 million in revenues.