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LivingSocial Sells Over ONE MILLION Amazon Gift Cards Worth $20 Million in Card Value
Alright deal hunters of any level, here’s a deal you will want to jump on asap. Group buying service LivingSocial is offering a nationwide deal on an Amazon gift card. The deal offers a $20 Amazon gift card for $10. What makes this deal even better is that you can use any “deal bucks” you have in your account towards the purchase. Most buyers (including myself) have purchased the deal for $5 instead of $10.
Update 7am Eastern: The deal counter is now nearing 110,000 gift certificates sold.
Update 9am Eastern: The deal counter is now over 175,000 gift certificates sold for a total value of $3.5 million although many are reporting purchasing tens of deals which LS may very well cancel. It’s also important to note that LS has changed the terms of the deal after the start by removing the ability to use “deal bucks” – I hope this does not impact my transaction from early this morning.
Update 9:30am Eastern: Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Venture Partners calls today’s deal, “the first step of operational integration from that investment.” He’s referring to the investment Amazon made in LS late last year.
Update 10:30am Eastern: We are now up to over 300,000 gift cards ordered. I can absolutely confirm that it’s not 300,000 customers that have ordered as many are reporting ordering up to 100 (!) cards.
Update 1:30pm Eastern: We are now over 550,000 gift cards ordered which is over $10 million in total gift cards.
Update 3:00pm Eastern: We are up to 700,000 gift cards for $12 million in total gift card value.
Update 6:00pm Eastern: We are now over 900,000 gift cards worth $18 million in card value.
Update 8:00pm Eastern: Just hit 1 MILLION GIFT CARDS SOLD!
As of 5:30AM Eastern, LivingSocial shows their purchased counter reaching nearly 100,000. I am unsure of what the maximum number of gift cards they will sell so that’s why I am suggesting you act fast if you want in on this deal.
My question with this deal is just how much is LivingSocial losing on the deal?
- LS clearly notes that Amazon is not a sponsor of this promotion so how much did LS purchase the gift cards for? As Chris points out in the comments, Amazon is a major investor in LivingSocial.
- Most LS customers will have some amount of “deal bucks” in their account so the average purchase amount will be much closer to $5 than $10
- There’s a lot of talk about how to get more than one deal per person – basically you create multiple email addresses and use multiple credit cards. Most times this isn’t an issue as people don’t want 10 (or 100) massages or ribeye steaks but for deals like this there will be more people looking to buy multiple offers – and remember, each email is forwarding the deal on so they are getting “deal bucks” as they refer themselves over and over.
Wondering if this is considered big in deal land? The SlickDeals thread discussing the deal has 150 pages with over 2,250 replies since 12AM this morning!
Here’s a link to the deal – ignore whatever city is listed since the deal is nationwide. (note: if you use the link in this last sentence, I get a referral credit towards my purchase which is appreciated.)
[...] seen a large number of nationwide deals including Groupon’s Barnes & Noble deal, LivingSocial’s Amazon gift card deal, Redbox, Blockbuster Express and Groupon’s eBay deal. Today Groupon is offering a deal with [...]
[...] 3rd, 2011 Comment Tweet Two weeks ago group buying service LivingSocial offered Amazon gift cards for 50% off. They “sold” over 1 million of the cards in a 24-hour period. As you can see I put [...]
[...] a $20 Amazon.com gift card for half the price, grabbed the attention of shoppers around the web. CenterNetworks reports that by 8:00pm EST the site’s purchased counter hit 1 [...]
It’ll be interesting to see whether the newly added fine print is applied retrospectively. Not only did they add a clause about purchasing using Deal Bucks, they also limited the offer to US-based customers only. That wasn’t the case when I bought mine in Europe. I wonder if they’ll honour it.
You would need a screenshot and independently verify the time is correct. I think if LivingSocial changed their terms as the deal was going on, they should honor the terms as written prior to the change. So, if the deal said one per account and not one per person, that means a person could create multiple accounts and all purchases would need to be honored. LivingSocial in this case I think defined one person as really being one IP. LivingSocial didn’t sell what they claim… they sold a lot less if you count unique IP addresses only.
We tried to dispute it with them, cause I too ended up buying it for $5. They basically said too bad, cancel if you don’t want it.
oh well then you should stop back here tomorrow if that’s the case, because i will open a can of woopass.
amazon has always done the right thing and i hope they will step in should the need arise.
Hey Alan,
Do you know if they accept more than one gift card in the same transaction?
i don’t know but i do know my name is allen :)
amazon has excellent systems for dealing with gift cards so i am thinking 80% not
Sorry, Allen!!
yea i don’t know why when people call me Alan it gets under my skin but it does :) my friends all know this and they love to torture me! heh
LOL can’t wait!
What I love is that this is the new advertising.
No need for a costly ad agency and even more costly television advertising (superbowl ad anyone?)
Just give people money to sign up, have an amazing service and a confident brand, have some historical and competitive info on exactly what each new signup is worth to you and your clients over the course of a typical user lifetime.
Then just give money away. This is what launched PayPal, and it worked. Congratulations LivingSocial. As an aside, I do like cupcakes, but I don’t want to click on your interstitials; nothing personal !
- Srini
TinyVox • Infinite Tape Deck
From my understanding, they’re not going to give those that purchased the gift card for $5.00, and instead charge them the normal $10 price.
This is coming from their Facebook Page. Check out their comments left for other users.
Jenny – if they charge me $10 when it clearly said $5 in the wee hours this morning, you can be assured you will see another post on this blog. It’s fine if they change the deal terms but honor the deal as it was written before you changed it.
This sets a new record for a deal in Living Social. Last year, their hottest deal sold 14,366 coupons of a $60 gift card they offered for $30 at wine.com. Seems like discounts on gift cards make attractive deals for customers.
I found a new link!
(removed)
The deal is only available for 18 more hours. $20 Amazon gift certificate that never expires and can be used to purchase anything on Amazon.com for only $10 (50% off)!
Buy a $20 Amazon.com Gift Card for only $10. Link for this deal: (removed)
[...] to LivingSocial a $20 Amazon gift card for just $10, and according to a number of reports the cards have been flying off the virtual shelves, as word of the deal spreads through Twitter and other social networks. With an estimated 300,000 [...]
FYI you can’t use your dealbucks just for this one deal.
you could – as i did – but they changed the terms later on this morning :(
no idea how they will handle this since they haven’t replied to my msg on twitter as of yet
My name is Storerobber and I’m going to call Amazon to ruin it for other people. LOL
Amazon is a major investor in livingsocial – this is just a cheap way ($10 ish) to acquire new customers. MyCityDeal, a UK groupon clone bought by groupon recently did something similiar with £1 movie tickets.
This is what I get for writing a post at 4:30am :) Completely forgot about that – thanks Chris – added a note in the post.