consumer: quite the daily deal!

Unless you were in a bunker yesterday, it’s highly unlikely that you or a friend of yours wasn’t buying the Living Social daily deal and then spreading around the link to your friends via one service or another.

I get notification of them every day along with many other daily deal and deep discount sites, but they’re mostly for local spas and restaurants, giving the small business owner a chance to increase customer traffic and hopefully turn deal-seekers into return customers. Well yesterday morning, the message came in and the deal was a $20 Amazon.com gift card for $10. That’s something everyone can use, so I clicked buy and then feeling the tiniest bit like a shill, I crafted a link to send out over twitter and Facebook.* That was just before 8am… by 9 or so, twitter was going nuts with links to the deal. Living Social’s site was so stressed that confirmation e-mails didn’t going out until near midnight, but I had more than a few people buy through my link, so my deal was free–sadly they put a limit of one card on it or people would have really cleaned up. Even so, because this was something universal, no one really felt like it was too spammy though it did root out one or two people I’m following on twitter that don’t shop at amazon all that often.**

You know what's cool? 1 million deals. http://ow.ly/3GQPS

— LivingSocial (@LivingSocial) January 20, 2011

The deal ended about an hour or so ago and the final tally was 1,301,296 deals purchased. That’s a gross sales total of around $13 million for Living Social.*** Not too shabby, even when you consider the free deals that resulted from extra heavy link sharing. Last year, Groupon featured a deal at GAP that sold well, but looks like Living Social beat it with yesterday’s offering. Sadly, today they were back to restaurant and spa/salon deals around the nation, but I’m guessing they made a lot of new fans yesterday.

Most of their deals don’t thrill me because I’m more of a food snob and picky about where I eat. I’ll bite if it’s a restaurant I like or have been looking forward to, but I’ve had more than one certificate expire because I just don’t make the time. If they can find a more diverse range of local businesses to get in on their deals, I could easily become a daily deal shop-a-holic again.