Deals Direct has dropped its online daily deal site, DealMe, with CEO, Michael McRitchie citing ‘customer fatigue’ as a leading cause for its closure.

“I think there is saturation of those daily deal sites and the group buying sites,” McRitchie told Inside Retail.

“I think there is customer fatigue with the number of emails that are getting sent to customers on a multi basis, and on a multi email per day basis.”

McRitchie believes this stage occurs in most young industries as they reach a maturity point.

“It’s only the strong that will survive within that given space and we’re not as strong in daily deals.”

McRitchie joined Deals Direct as CEO in June, and said the closure came following a company review.

“What was quite clear when I first joined was the need for the Deals Direct Group to focus on their core business, their online department store, Deals Direct. Where we weren’t strong was is in our adjacencies.

“Our first decision was to roll up our supermarket business into a category within Deals Direct as opposed to having it as its own business.

“The second decision that we have made is the closure of DealMe, [as] it just hadn’t proven to be as successful as we would have liked.

Another reason for the closure was the level of competition against the leading daily deal sites.

“The group buying space is obviously really competitive as so is the online department store space.

“DealMe was competing against the likes of Groupon, LivingSocial [and] Scoopon, and we’re not in the same league as them, but when we’re competing in the pure online department store space, we‘re a leader.”

The company will now focus on its core site and improving its current product range.

“We’ve already got everything single category you can imagine, there’s probably a couple of niche categories you could say we don’t have, like books, but we’ve got the main categories covered and the focus is adding greater depth, and value to that.”