I’ll admit, I get most of my inspiration for these blog posts from The Huffington Post … and this post is no exception. Upon skimming through the ‘Tech’ section this morning I came across a title that read “Amazon will offer half-price gift cards Tuesday …”. I am in no need of purchasing books, but naturally the words “half-price” caught my attention. Tomorrow, Amazon is offering users a $10 gift card for $5 through its 9-month old subsidiary AmazonLocal.
Until this morning I had never even heard of AmazonLocal (which is pretty shocking considering I’m a tech/web-nerd), so I decided to read more about it. The website mimics the business plan of pioneering deal-of-the-day websites like Groupon and Living Social. I was rather shocked to think that Amazon.com would need to implement this type of promotion; however, once finishing the article it made perfect sense. Neither my library buddies nor myself had even heard of AmazonLocal, so what Amazon.com is doing proves that this promotional tactic is indeed effective. It takes one person like me to spread the word via WOM or even this blog post! Unfortunately the website only caters to the U.S (currently in over 90 cities and 26 states).
Amazon sold a $10-for-$20 deal on Groupon and sold a whopping 1.4 million of the cards. But here is the catch – they did so only 1 month after launching the AmazonLocal website. Evidently this could indicate that awareness or sales were low. Now, we can assume that those shopping on AmazonLocal are either shoppers or are aware of Amazon.com, so it seems appropriate to also assume that the company will be able to sell a substantial amount of these $5-for-$10 cards.
History has proven that launching these daily-deals can be extremely tricky (think ‘Facebook Deals’ back in August), but it is also a growing trend. I mean, who doesn’t love a deal? With this being said, Amazon is just going to have to find a way to offer these deals in a context that consumers can relate to, appreciate, or enjoy.
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