The daily deal space is flooded with a score of daily deal companies from around the world. The online shoppers have always been thankful to group buying for its reward in form of deep discounts on whatever they buy. So far so wonderful. The thing got tad messy when they were flabbergasted to the point of inability to get hold of discounted products or catch sight of incredible discounts because of forays of local deals from eclectic sources.

Naturally, an organizer was direly needed—that could ensure bargain hunters obtain local deals according to their needs and did not lose particular deals in the deals marathon. Deal aggregation was emerged as the answer to the problem. Deal aggregation, as the name implies, is not directly involved in engineering discounts in collaboration with the merchants and retailers as group buying companies do. They, however, scour deals from group buying sites and publish them on their portals as third parties.

For customers, deal aggregation is beneficial because it enables them to get customized and categorized local deals. Deal aggregators collect deals from various daily deal sites and through their email communications send consolidated emails each containing filtered local deals to the subscribers according to their preferences. So next time for example when discount seekers want an array of choices in dining deals, a deal aggregator would just send them.

For daily deal companies, alliance with deal aggregators is also win-win. By that, they get access to customers and markets that are untapped. Many of the popular group buying sites including Buywithme, Dealster, GiltCity, etc. are running their affiliate schemes successfully and witnessing surge in numbers of visitors redirected from the third party deal aggregators.

There are several deal aggregators busy in scavenging deals from local group buying daily deal sites—such as Yippit with more than 300 active deal providers in 32 cities in North America, PriceGrabber covering 160 cities, Dealaboo listing local daily deals of around 100 daily deal sites in 79 cities of North America, Canada, Middle East, and Malaysia, Dealery covering 87 cities across the US and Canada, Dealhamper, Dealsurf, and the list is awesomely long.

But, not all things go in favor of mushrooming deal aggregation portals as daily deal companies are getting extremely cautious of how third party publishers are displaying their deals.

Groupon came harsh on a Malaysian-based deal aggregator recently warning it of legal action if the site did not expunge its deals immediately. The rage was equivocal but seemingly vented on the violation of affiliation program by the aggregator.

The situation got tense to the extent that No. 1 daily deal company forgot about its stature and threw out remarks to belittle all the deal aggregators right away.

“There are many benefits to being a Groupon subscriber – namely, that you see deals that are relevant to you, some of which are private to your email and not accessible by aggregators,” the deal-a-day bellwether claimed in an email.

Behind the anger lies perceptibly a natural fear of losing market shares. This was courageously conceded by the No. 2 LivingSocial when it abolished its affiliate program or confined it to perhaps few names.

Fear of competition from ‘different but related business models’ as Living Social said, compelled it to risk loss of new shoppers generated by the deal aggregators.

Deal aggregators have become an unavoidable manifestation in the daily deals field. Yipit that no long ago was run on seed money of friends has now managed to mobilize multimillion dollars in venture capital. With the beginning of aggregation by the likes of Google and Amazon that have financial capacity to launch independent local daily deal group buying companies, this existence has been deep rooted.