SiteBuilder offers many features of Web-page development systems for high-end sites, with two bonuses.
Other high-end sites have rejected the Groupon model in favor of their strategies.
Mr. Steele said advertising this way was much cheaper than advertising by buying directly on high-end sites; he used CondéNet, which now goes by Condé Nast Digital, as an example.
Ice.com's website today operates as a marketplace, and specifically one that targets the middle of the market – meaning rings that are more likely around the $100 price point, not $5,000-plus, as on high-end sites.
Since August, Joe Nye New York has been open to the public; now, nearly half its sales, Mr. Nye said, come from customers driven there by 1st Dibs, the high-end auction site.
MyLittleSwans.com, a new high-end travel site, is focused primarily on family travel with suggested itineraries for more than 30 destinations, based on vacations taken by the founder, Katrina Garnett, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and her family.
The service has already attracted an impressive roster of financial backers — raising a seed round of financing from Harrison Metal and Greylock, as well as Alison Pincus, the founder of the high-end retail site One Kings Lane, Dave Morin of Path, and Dennis Crowley, the chief executive of Foursquare.
"Once you've had a taste of it, it's really hard to go back to commercial," said Katrina Garnett, founder of mylittleswans.com, a high-end travel site that partners with Lufthansa Private Jet, a brand of the European carrier, for connecting flights in Europe.
Instead they might register it as land for a recreational center, a high-end tourist site, a hotel, or a resort -- and then incorporate a course into the project.
