Atlanta-based nCrowd, a social commerce company, announced Wednesday that it purchased the deal division of South Florida-based Saveology.com. Under the agreement, nCrowd acquired the consumer and merchant relationships from Saveology’s deal business that offered local and national coupons in 42 markets nationwide.

nCrowd is the parent company of social commerce websites CrowdSavings, Half Off Depot, Groupalicious, Tippr and Spreebird.

Via email, nCrowd’s Chief Operating Officer Lance Weatherby  told me “this is our 22nd such acquisition. We have been buying deal companies since the fall of 2011 when we saw an opportunity to consolidate the deal market.” Wetherby said. “The reason we saw that opportunity was three fold. One we were fresh off a $7 million Series A with Noro-Moseley Partners as the lead and had money in the bank. Two, we were were able to get cash flow positive. And three, our model had and continues to have much more leverage than a daily deal model so we are able to purchase companies that are failing and apply our model to their assets.”

Some might question if there is still a market or viable business model for daily deals. I know I have questions about it! When Groupon first hit the scene back in 2008 I loaded up on a bunch of stuff for a great price.  But the truth is I often never used the things I bought. I'm guessing that was the case for many people and why many daily deal companies -- including Groupon are trying to reinvent who they are and what they do.   

But Wetherby believes nCrowd has figured out how to make the social commerce business profitable.

"The difference in our model is that we have a marketplace of offers. Think of it as an Amazon of experiences. This model enables to sell much more then a daily deal company and most of our customers come to us via web searches and not via email. We have been doing this since 2010 and Groupon and Living Social are actually in the process of changing their business model more in the line of ours because it is superior."