Consumers are easily blinded by discounts. Daily deals exploit precisely this weakness. However, there is a big difference between daily deals as well as normal ecommerce and real-life physical sales transactions: you need to expend additional effort to obtain your purchased goods or services after paying instead of having your item handed to you immediately over the counter or delivered to your doorstep.

Ergo, any method that delays or discourages redemption creates pure profit. Make the window of redemption smaller or conditions more stringent, and careless consumers temporarily blinded by price into thinking “the trouble will be worth it because of the ridiculously-low price” will probably buy without actually redeeming when the time comes. I suspect that certain prepaid services, such as companies selling airplane tickets, travel packages, and cellular phone credits, also profit considerably from exploiting this gap.

This technique is, of course, ethically questionable, but it is certainly not unlawful – freedom of contract governs all commercial transactions. It is a well-known fact that the further into the future the redemption event is from the time of payment, the lower the chances of said redemption event ever happening are. Memory, unpredictability of schedules, sunk cost mentality, etc. work exponentially in favor of the daily deal vendors as time passes.

Merchants certainly are already doing this in some form, yet very few have actually formalized it into an actual strategy. Why not?