I received an e-mail from Amazon today with a really cool promotion that they’re doing called Customers Vote. Basically it allows you to vote on a total of 6 different rounds deals on products at pretty ridiculous prices (ex: the first week has PS3 bundles starting at $199 instead of a list price of $574+). Each round has 3 different deals that you can choose from.

Each round of deals is tied to a specific day, so the PS3 stuff is for the first day which is November 27th (Thursday - Thanksgiving). If you get randomly selected, you’ll see an e-mail the day before letting you know. That means you should then login early on Thursday as you’ll have the opportunity to buy the product. Keep in mind that there are going to be a lot more participants selected than products available, to it is a race to try and buy first. There are a good number of products though, for example there are going to be 500 of the PS3’s.

This is somewhat familiar to Amex’s My Wishlist, but I actually like the way it works better. Generally for those doing Amex’s My Wishlist, the servers always get pounded, and a majority of the time the site goes down…pretty annoying. By Amazon pre-selecting the participants, I’m sure a big part of the reasoning behind that is to limit how many people are hitting the site. This way there should be no server issues, and you’ll know from the get go whether you’re too late or not.

This is a great promotion from Amazon for a few reasons:

• It’s a cool promotion, hey, it got me writing about it
• It will get people onto the site and looking at products. Amazon is known to have a very high conversion of visitors:buy ratio. Getting visitors to the site is the main step.
• The promotion page links to the products they are selling at a discount. This helps the conversion:buy process, and should help generate some sales simple for awareness factor.
• They are not giving the products away. A PS3 bundle which they normally sell for $574 is being sold for $199, which means they aren’t giving away their true cost. If they were to give these bundles away it would be $287,000 worth of product. Let’s say there is a 30% margin on them, they end up giving away $200,900. Instead,? they are charging $199 for 500 units, which is about $100,000. That means they are really only giving away about $100,000 of true dollars…a savings of $100,000.

If you haven’t already done so, get over to the Amazon Customers Vote page, and vote for each of the 6 days to try and get some deals of your own!? If you happen to win, make sure and post in our comments to let us know.