Australians far and wide are jumping on the bandwagon and grabbing up $29 all-you-can-eat yum cha vouchers or $39 spa pamper deals. We can’t get enough of it.

Fast forward to 2014 and the fervour has well and truly subsided. After the initial love of a new fad, consumers increasingly perceive them as just that — a fad.

Analytics firm Experian found its data showed the industry is starting to see a decline. The total visits made to the top 14 group buying websites on desktop and mobile declined by 22.8 per cent from May 2013 to November 2014. Experian data does not include or analyse traffic to apps.

So what’s going? Do Australians not like a bargain anymore?

To understand Australians’ relationships with group buying and deals sites, it needs to be understood that Australia doesn’t have the kind of coupon culture that’s entrenched elsewhere.

Sure, we love a sale and people have a few loyalty cards in their wallets. But we don’t cut out 50 cents off orange juice coupons from catalogues. We don’t like the hassle of collecting, and remembering, a 50c-off coupon — we’d rather just see the big red ‘sale’ ticket on the shelf.

So convincing Australians to try out a different way of shopping was quite the feat in the first place.

At the peak of deals site mania, there were more than 80 group buying sites flogging cheap bargains. A couple of years in, the inevitable consolidation process happened and most sites either folded or got acquired by the bigger players, leaving maybe a dozen dominant brands.

“Group buying exploded in Australia in 2010 and was heralded as the next ‘big thing’ in retail,” Experian general manager David Chinn said. “Increased competition in the group buying industry led to oversaturation, with customers being inundated by daily offers from a number of sites.

“As a whole, the industry also suffered a number of setbacks including widespread customer complaints, inefficiencies and major recalls. As a result, customers have lost confidence and turned back to more trusted brands that began to offer significant discounts in order to hold onto market share.”

Complaints against group buying sites included a series of high profile incidents in which state fair trading bodies were asked to intervene. In the 12 months to June 2012, NSW Fair Trading had received more than 2000 complaints.

A common complaint among consumers was a merchant who was unable to cope with the number of sales. For example, a customer may have bought a cheap massage deal but one month before it expired, that customer can’t get an appointment because of all the deals that had been sold. In some of those situations, the retailer said ‘tough luck, you have to use it by the expiration date’ and the customer lost their money.

In another example, a Chinese restaurant in Sydney (which has since changed its name) sold an ‘All-You-Can-Eat’ deal on dumplings. But customers complained that they weren’t allowed to select the dumplings and was not allowed to order any more until the plate in front of them was finished.

Customer Ros North had told news.com.au earlier that he had lost $280 on a fishing trip when the trip was cancelled twice by the tour company. But then the voucher had expired and the company refused to honour it.

Then there were the throngs of angry customers after a LivingSocial deal for cheap Havaianas was oversold significantly, leading to long delays and cancellations.

At the time, there were also a lot of questions being asked about whether service-based merchants and businesses such as restaurants saw much value from running a group buying deal. While the deals got customers in the door, some merchants said they rarely saw return business from those customers as many were only interested in chasing a discount.

Since the establishment of an industry code of conduct, those complaints have reduced.

Group buying has also suffered setbacks in the US. Groupon has been plagued by financial troubles for years. Its share price is barely a third of the value of its initial public offering while its founder, Andrew Mason, was sacked by the board early last year.

Technology consultant Telsyte valued the group buying industry’s Australian revenues at $501 million in 2013, marginally down from $504 million in 2012. But its senior analyst, Steven Noble, expects the revenues will likely fall much further this year.

While it doesn’t have comprehensive figures yet for 2014, Mr Noble said: “That fall in [web] traffic doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Without a doubt, that will correspond with a fall in revenue.”

But he said that group buying does have a place in the Australian retail landscape. But it’s not the “magic bullet that will transform everything it touches”, he said.

“There was sensational growth and while there is a current contraction, you still have a sector that didn’t exist 10 years ago. The survivors will have captured value for themselves. But the broader retail industry, consumer and media view was that it was going to be bigger than it could’ve been.”

Editor’s note: The individual web traffic statistics for Living Social, Groupon, Deals, Our Deal and Ouffer have been removed from a previous version of the story on advice from the analytics firm, Experian, that originally supplied the numbers. It was replaced with data for the category.

Do you still use group buying sites? Let us know in the comments below.