Last quarter, consumers purchased $17.43 billion of products from Amazon. As they piled their virtual shopping carts high with everything from books to camping equipment, they gave Amazon valuable information about their shopping habits.
Amazon already uses that information to recommend products. Eventually, they could use the same data to target daily deals.
Amazon took a first -- and standard -- step toward personalizing its deal recommendations on Thursday with a new preference profile. Customers of its daily deals site, AmazonLocal, can indicate how interested they are in receiving deals in categories. Google's daily deals site already has a similar profile. Groupon introduced a tag system in November that allows users to indicate what deal qualities they like. Groupon competitor LivingSocial, in which Amazon is an investor, selects deals for customers based on factors such as past purchased deals.
With its treasure trove of data, Amazon could automatically make pretty solid recommendations without asking users to do any of this work. Google could do the same. As of now, neither has.
“It’s an interesting thing to think about — the intersection of consumer products and services that are fulfilled by local merchants,” Mike George, Amazon’s VP of local, told AllThingsD. “There are some things that are logical that I believe we will discover that we would never have really thought about. This part is very new to us.”
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the company's future plans.