LivingSocial's Attention-Getting Amazon Offer

The daily deal sites LivingSocial and Groupon, one getting financial backing from Amazon.com and the other (presumably) setting itself up for a major initial public offering, went after consumers and each other hard yesterday.

Opening up our email at 9:29 a.m. EST, we were pleasantly surprised to see an offer from LivingSocial that allowed us to purchase a $20 Amazon gift card (almost like giving cash to a frequent Amazon user) for $10.

Turns out we were not the only ones happy with the deal as more than a million people had taken LivingSocial and Amazon up on the offer by Wednesday evening. TechCrunch said LivingSocial was selling vouchers at a clip of 85 a minute. A piece on the Mashable site as well as others estimated that over two million might eventually go for the deal by 8:00 a.m. EST.

Interestingly (note we didn't say surprisingly), an offer from Groupon came in exactly 30 minutes later (9:59 EST). We and others were informed, "It's time to get your Groupon!" What that meant was we could take an additional $10 off our first Groupon purchased between now and Feb. 2.

• LivingSocial Sells 1 Million Amazon Vouchers and Counting - Mashable
• LivingSocial's Amazon Deal Closing In On 1 Million Customers - Business Insider
• LivingSocial Gets Nearly 1 Million to Sign Up for Amazon Deal - PC Magazine
• LivingSocial Hits A Million Amazon Gift Cards Sold, $20 Million In Card Value - TechCrunch