The Effects of the Amazon Deal On the Social Buying Market

A couple days ago I talked about Amazon, Google, Living Social and Groupon. The gist of it was that Amazon was essentially injecting millions of marketing dollars into LivingSocial.com by allowing the 1/2 price deal. It is not always easy to measure the effects of marketing investments, but today we have a chance to compare a snapshot of the market. Another competitor to Groupon.com and LivingSocial.com is Gottahalfit.com. Before the Amazon deal, Gottahalfit was just about par with LivingSocial.com, size and popularity wise. (Livingsocial was tad bit more popular because their vacation packages were getting some attention from the media.)

Today in South Florida, both LivingSocial and Gottahalfit both had a discounted gift certificate for the exact same place, with the same terms and the same price. The results of their sales? At the time of this writing, Gottahalfit sold 13. LivingSocial on the other hand, has sold 333. That is an almost 30 -1 difference. The profits today for both Markets?: Gottahalfit: $130. LivingSocial: $3,330.00. And that is only once product in one market for one day. You need to multiply that across all the 100 plus markets currently being served to really understand the effect that one little simple promotional event has had.

update: The final tally was 466 - 15. If these results were to hold across all markets, does Gottahalfit call it a day, or do they have a card they can play?