Only 4 months after its launch Facebook is shutting down Facebook Deals service

Facebook is shutting down its Deals service reports Reuters. Facebook’s Groupon-like deal service was only launched late April in 5 major cities in the United States. It offered the ability to cash in on deals local to you and your network.

“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” said a spokesperson. “We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.”

Facebook’s Deals service was launched as an obvious response to Groupon and LivingSocial and other local deal sites. Besides Facebook also Google responded with its own Daily Deals service after it failed to purchase Groupon late last year. Facebook’s product was very similar to any of the others on the market and failed to successfully leverage much of Facebook’s social graph in the way that other products like its games do.

The question is if Facebook will abandon the deals market altogether or that it will take what it has learned from its first attempt and come back with a more agressive option.

Source: The Next Web