Last Tuesday, between 3 a.m. and 8:11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, AmazonLocal had a deal where $5 netted a $10 AmazonLocal gift card. Within 17 hours, they sold one million daily deal vouchers. Clearly, this sort of initiative is going to put AmazonLocal's main competitor, Groupon, on alert.
Instead of relying on its partner LivingSocial, Amazon instead relied on the knowledge that consumers love a good deal. The truth is that good copywriting certainly helps, but when a deal is too good to miss out on, the product is going to sell itself. That is made even more clear by the fact that Amazon did not share the news on its Facebook Fan page (which has 3.2 million likes/fans) or its moderately successful Twitter account (which has only 2,700 Twitter followers).
The truth is that for a service that only launched nine short months ago; this type of deal seems perfect for AmazonLocal. Not only is it going to increase exposure for their service (let's face it, we are talking about it right now) but the truth is that as with most vouchers, there are going to be several initial buyers that will not use their voucher for anything. A great deal of publicity and $5 million in 17 hours? That sounds like a successful strategy.
