Just when you thought you’d signed up for every service designed to bring you sweet deals, another heavyweight wades into the market to add another offer to your inbox. On Tuesday, Amazon announced Amazon Local, the Seattle-based ecommerce giant’s answer to the flurry of group discount sites exploding across the Internet.
Amazon Local will launch the first deals in Chicago (where Groupon’s corporate headquarters are located), Seattle, Los Angeles and about a dozen smaller markets. But even when they reach your city, you likely won’t need to sign up. If you’re an Amazon member you’re already in the program. You just verify your city and Amazon promises to get you a deal as soon as your city is up and running, if it isn’t already.
Amazon, like Priceline, Google and other giants recently entering this space, was an easy fit for the market. As the Internet’s undisputed megamall Goliath, the company will no doubt be able to leverage their reach and clout to bring great deals to customers; and it will have much better visibility into your shopping patterns, hopefully avoiding the poorly targeted deals that have caused many people to already tune out Groupon.
The real remaining question then becomes: If every major website is offering us deals, will there ever be a service to help us keep track of them all? In other words, when will the first meta-discount site be out?
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