LivingSocial Flexes Amazon Partnership Muscles; Offers $20 Amazon Gift Cards For $10

Frank Gruber January 19, 2011 Tweet

Today I woke up to a sea of LivingSocial news updates on Facebook and Twitter from my friends, relatives and colleagues about an amazing deal today. Today’s hot deal offers anyone a $20 Amazon gift card when you purchase a $10 LivingSocial Deal, so you make $10 for buying the deal. And of course, like all LivingSocial deals, once you purchase, share your deal with others and if three friends buy it, yours is free. You can purchase the deal here. Why is this such a big deal? Well, for a couple of reasons.

First, LivingSocial has been slugging it out with Groupon for “Daily Deal” supremacy. Groupon has been snagging a lot of attention due to the money they have raised and turned down as they look to IPO.

Secondly, it shows how Amazon could apply LivingSocial’s daily deal strategy and harness more customers. Amazon invested $175 million in LivingSocial in December and this is the first real instance of them working together. It might be a perfect match.

So how well is today’s Amazon deal doing? I saw a tweet from LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy that said, “My Facebook feed is a thing of beauty” and so I asked him, “is it all LivingSocial and Amazon today? ” and he confirmed “Pretty much.” Which tells me LivingSocial is tickled by the social impacts of today’s daily deal. But that is just on person’s opinion – let’s look at the stats. As of 11:30am ET today, the deal had already sold around 350,000 units, which elicited a “WOW” from Steve Case on Twitter. By 12:45pm ET, the deal had moved another 100,000 units at around 507,000 deals.

@Oshy and @FrankGruber Twitter Conversation

Steve Case, founder of AOL and now investor in LivingSocial among other things, is wondering if it will be a record day for LivingSocial. I think he is on to something. We’ll have to wait and see what the final deals sold tally is at the end of the day. Leave your best guess in the comments below.