Valuevine is expanding its social shopping services with the acquisition of Caravan, an early-stage Seattle startup which like Groupon and Living Social has designed a way for small local merchants to tout their goods and services online. Caravan, which has been operating in private beta, is led by Pete Mannix who previously served as director of engineering at Recruiting.com (formerly Jobster). As a result of the acquisition, Mannix is joining Valuevine as chief technology officer.

It is not like Mannix is unfamiliar to the Valuevine exec team, since founders Neil Crist and James Gallagher also previously worked at Jobster. Crist said it was a priority to hire a top-notch CTO this year, and adding the Caravan service to the Valuevine portfolio also made sense.

"Strategically we knew that bringing our software expertise in-house was a fundamental shift that had to happen," he said. "With the addition of the very complimentary Caravan capabilities, putting this deal together was a big win for us."

Caravan works much like the other group buying services, encouraging users of the service to share the deal in order to take advantage of savings. But Mannix, who founded Caravan in 2009, thinks there's room to capitalize in the emerging field. "Retailers are essentially waiting in line to be the deal of the day, sometimes waiting months," said Mannix. "If that retailer already has a sizable audience on social networks and over email, Caravan is a great low-cost alternative."

We wrote about Valuevine last month after the company disclosed details about its new service for connecting local merchants with customers.Valuevine says it has about 20 retailers using its technology at the moment, with plans to boost that number this year. Here's a look at a sample page for the Caravan service: