Groupon, the daily-deals service that has focused on restaurants and other services, is adding gadgets and other goods.

Story highlights

Groupon adds online retailing to daily deals

Groupon Goods will feature actual items alongside services like restaurant discounts

Items will be shipped straight from retailers, with a limit on how many you can buy

CNN  — 

Groupon, always good for a discounted pizza or spa treatment, is adding gadgets and other goods in an e-commerce expansion.

Groupon Goods, unveiled this week by the Chicago-based Web service, is a departure for the company which, since 2008, has been sharing mainly service-industry offers with users as it helped define the daily-deals space.

The move comes as Groupon approaches a $750 million public stock offering (albeit one that has been postponed amid a turbulent stock market).

“Groupon Goods features really good deals on great products,” Groupon wrote on the FAQ page about the service. “To get airspace on Groupon Goods, a product has to be cool enough to share and innovative enough to inspire. It also must be made of reliably bonded molecules and stardust.

“Honestly, if we think a product is remarkable and we can offer a good deal on it, we’ll do so.”

So, presumably, you could score a deal on a laptop, smartphone or other gadget along with the typical sort of offers. (We’re holding out hope for the combination headphones/hair rejuvenation system that shoots lasers at your head.)

If Groupon didn’t have a history of irreverent descriptions and humor (Super Bowl ad, anyone?) that would sound an awful lot to us like a line lifted from Woot!, the venerable site which, since 2004, has been offering … well … daily deals promoted with irreverent descriptions and humor.

The service will limit the number of daily items each user can purchase and, at least in the beginning, ship straight from the retailer. All products will be shipped in the contiguous 48 U.S. states, with shipping to Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and Canada possible depending on the individual deal.

The Groupon Goods deals will arrive daily in users’ e-mail, the same way current Groupon offers do.