Groupon may be the best known group-buying site around, but competitor LivingSocial is making a name for itself with a little help from its big brother Amazon. Today, they launched a promotion that is buzzing across all social networks and trending on the search engines.
The deal offers buyers who subscribe 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 cards sold within a few hours of the deal being launched, the offer was already worth about $3 million. If the pace of buying continues, the deal — which is available for 24 hours — could generate as much or more gross revenue as a deal that Groupon did with The Gap last year, which brought in about $11 million.
Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Ventures, one of LivingSocial’s financial backers, said that the deal is “the first step of operational integration” as a result of the Amazon investment, which totalled $175 million. It’s unknown exactly how much revenue this will generate for LivingSocial, but it definitely shows that the partnership between Amazon.com and LivingSocial could put some serious pressure or Groupon.
At the time of this writing, the LivingSocial deal has 19 hours remaining, so get it while the getting is good.
via GigaOm