[chuckwnelson]

I installed the Gilt app mentioned in the article. Push notifications and emails almost everyday.

This is exactly how you get me to deny the request for push notifications.

This will be true until the end of time: be useful to your customer, not spammy.

[kunle]

Understood - for flash sales though, a large portion of the demand is driven by the fact that the items are only available in limited quantities. As a result these pushes generate huge spikes of traffic - it's spammy if you don't care that the selection quickly shrinks, but if you're a compulsive shopper (true for a large swath of the shopping population) then you depend on it.