
LivingSocial Confirms $175 Million Amazon Investment - andre3k1
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/livingsocial-confirms-175-million-amazon-investment/
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achille
Both Livingsocial and Groupon have lots of work ahead. They cover a large
demographic which they need to partition and customize.

If the deal I get in the morning isn't interesting to me, they failed. Ie:
both services will regularly email deals about SPAs and hot stone masages, I
would not expect many men to be interested by that deal.

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mark_l_watson
Good strategy, investing less than 1/25th of the money (as Google is
considering) in a competitor of Groupon. I guess that Amazon has little chance
of loosing money on this investment since LivingSocial is making money and
this business space will grow.

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unohoo
$500 million revenues - is that their commission or is it the total amount
they intend to bring in (including commission and sales) - there's a huge
difference between the two. Assuming $500 mill is their total sales and their
commission is 50%, this brings their 'actual' revenues to $250 mill - not a
tiny amount, but not nearly $500 mill as well.

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portman
You're using "sales", "commission", and "revenue" imprecisely/incorrectly.

The money they collect from customers is "revenue".

A portion of those revenues are paid to the local merchant. That is the "Cost
of Goods Sold".

The revenue minus the COGS is the "Gross Profit".

So, in your example, then they would indeed have $500M in revenue, and $250M
in gross profits.

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rokhayakebe
These guys are building real businesses with revenue growing super fast. The
beauty here is they saw a great business, Groupon, duplicated and raised bunch
of money to grab market share.

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enjo
I would argue that they've improved on it. At least here in Denver Living
Social is consistently more useful (particularly for my wife and our friends).
Were GroupOn has been going to a lot of non-local website deals recently,
Living Social manages to stay relevant. The wife was telling me that they're
apparently trying to branch out into things like Vacations as well, which
would be really cool.

