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This week, Groupon subscribers in Austin, Texas, are offered deals on rock climbing, Indian food and a produce delivery service. Meanwhile, within the same city, users of the Latino-oriented deals site Descuento Libre can buy discounted vouchers for dental care, prepaid mobile phone services and family fun pizza parlors.

Descuento Libre wants to be the Groupon for the Latino market, but its efforts also show how culturally specific such deal sites can be. Last week in Austin I met Descuento Libre co-founder and CTO Boris Portman and discussed the opportunity for his one-year-old startup, which received an undisclosed round of seed funding from Bravo Equity Partners in February.

The youngest and fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, Latinos represent a huge and largely untapped market for e-commerce. With strong extended family and social networks, this group actually uses social media more than any other group in the United States and is much more likely to buy a product endorsed by a member of their network than their white counterparts.

Latinos (both U.S.- and foreign-born) are already showing hints of their online purchasing power. At 18 percent of the U.S. population, they make up an estimated 13 percent of all online sales and spend around an estimated $22 billion on e-commerce per year, according to estimates from Jupiter Research.

Clearly, this group likes to drop dollars on a good deal online, just like everyone else in the nation. Yet only 3 percent of traffic to Groupon and other daily deal sites comes from Latinos, according to Quantcast figures for June 2011.

When starting his site last year, Portman said he was shocked to find that most Latino Internet users and business owners he spoke to hadn’t even heard of the daily deal concept. “While the rest of the country is already suffering from ‘deal fatigue,’ many Latinos have stayed away from the deal sites. They don’t know what they even are. You even have to explain the concept to the Latino business owners.” READ MORE