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Your support makes all the difference.Deal of the day, or daily deal sites such as Groupon or Amazon's Living Social are a popular craze throughout the world, but one Swedish company is taking the idea of limited time deals to another level by giving shoppers a mere four seconds to grab a bargain.
The Swedish site Speedsale, developed by retailer Papercut, presents a slideshow of varying products in rapid succession; shoppers have a mere four seconds to click on each product before the deal is gone forever.
Once the item is clicked it is then saved in the shopper's basket, however the website only gives shoppers one chance to grab the deals - if the opportunity is missed then the deal disappears and shoppers are redirected to Papercut's homepage.
If visitors try to return to the site after missing out then they are greeted with the sarcastic message "you had your chance but you blew it, welcome back in a billion years."
To make the whole experience more intense the products appear complete with a nerve-jangling soundtrack.
Papercut, the company behind the site, is an online retailer of music, dvds, books and other such products and works on a similar basis to the original Amazon.com.
Though the site is currently only in Swedish and prices are displayed in Krona it remains to be seen whether this will just be another fad - or whether the idea of bargain speed shopping could grow in popularity, at least as a means of driving traffic to a retailler's site.
The daily deal format works on the basis that customers are offered a product at a discounted rate for 24 hours, if enough people purchase the deal then all benefit; however if not enough people buy the deal then no one receives the discounted rate and customers' money is refunded.
The daily deal model is popular throughout the world; the two biggest daily deal sites are Living Social, run by Amazon and Groupon. Groupon is expanding rapidly and on April 6 announced the acquisition of Indonesian daily deal site Disdus, to add to an East Asian portfolio which currently contains Groupon Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong amongst others.
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