It could be a matter of glass half full or glass half empty when it comes to a new survey outlining merchant dissatisfaction with daily deals.

First, the full: "An average of eight out 10 merchants enjoy working with the daily deal companies, which validates that there is a significant value driving more transactions and revenue through the door,” the report published by the Susquehanna Financial Group and daily deal aggregator site Yipit said, noting that gaining more customers and a new marketing channel were the top source of kudos from merchants.

Despite that, 52 percent of merchants said they were not planning to feature deals within the next six months. After news of that apparent disenchantment emerged Monday, the stock price of daily deal leader Groupon, already below its $20 initial public offering price, tumbled further and was down to $17.88 a share by market close Thursday, with news reports suggesting the survey drove the decline.

But even Herman Leung, a senior research analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group, doesn’t quite get the negativity. (Disclosure: SFG says it is a market maker in the securities of Amazon, Google, and Groupon and that it or its affiliates beneficially own 1 percent or more of the securities of Google.) The merchant survey pool was just 100 out of 540 surveys sent out, and really, the results were mixed, he said.

“It could be viewed as a negative where merchants will not be using Groupon [or other daily deal sites] over the next six months,” Leung says. “Or you can view it as almost 50 percent do plan to use at least one deal over the next six months.”

In verbal interviews, merchants told the Susquehanna/Yipit research team that they’re using daily deal offers from the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial on an as-needed basis to drive business, although some seem to think that as the economy recovers, they can generate sufficient demand themselves. The top two sources of merchant displeasure: the level of discounting required for the deals and a shortage of return customers.

“A group of [the daily deal users] are coupon hounds, even if they are satisfied with the service, they might wait until the next Groupon comes around to visit that business again,” Leung says.

Despite that grumbling, “Groupon has a merchant pool of businesses that want to be on but have not been featured yet, and there’s a long list,” Leung says.

Boyan Josic, CEO of Daily Deal Media, agrees, saying that Groupon alone has tens of thousands of merchants signed up and waiting to run their first deal, “so they’re definitely not running out of willing merchants.”

Consultancy BIA/Kelsey has been projecting $2 billion in daily deal sales for 2011 and $4.2 billion by 2015, and that's presumably based on the idea that there's more business to be had in daily deals.

What’s more, Groupon actually recommends waiting three to six months before running a new deal anyway, so those merchants in the survey aren’t its target market, Josic says.

“We've run merchant studies in the past, and while you'll always have merchants who are dissatisfied, our results were nowhere near 50 percent,” Josic said. “The last survey we did, 14 percent of the responses came back with a negative rating.”

So what could daily deal sites like Groupon or LivingSocial do better? Well, thus far, they aren’t seeing the revenues that they might via their real-time deal offerings available on mobile apps, with only 10 percent of merchants surveyed considering using or testing services like Groupon Now, the new survey found.

“Those are areas for investment that are in the early stages, and you might not necessarily need to see results from it today, and it might not be important in the short term, but these could drive long-term numbers,” Leung says.

At the same time, current deal players may have more of a headache than the survey: Leung sees a potentially big rival in Google Offers, should it deploy Google Maps to offer the level of instant deals that Groupon and LivingSocial haven’t quite mustered up yet.

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com