GetGifted, the Charlottetown-based social media phenomenon, will launch tomorrow in Halifax, the largest city the young company has entered.

Founder and CEO Gillian McCrae said late last week the company has signed up about 40 merchants for the Halifax launch. Anyone in the Halifax area who wants a chance to land free merchandise can sign up on the GetGifted website.

Here’s how it works:  GetGifted asks local retailers to volunteer a selection of their wares as gifts for customers. So a restaurant might offer 30 deserts worth $10 each. Or a clothing store might put forward 50 pairs of mittens, worth $15 each. GetGifted gathers together all these gifts and then sends out an email telling its followers of all the gifts on offer.

It sends out the email at a different time each Tuesday. Once the email lands, the followers can speak for the limited number of gifts, though they can only accept one per merchant. They then have 14 days to actually go to the store or restaurant. They claim their gift by holding up the e-coupon on their smartphone to show they are a recipient. The merchants pay to subscribe and customarily end up selling the visiting customers merchandise worth several times than the price of the gift.

The most astonishing statistic produced by McCrae is that 10,000 people subscribe to the weekly gift-giveaway on P.E.I., 85 percent of them from Charlottetown. That’s almost one-quarter of Charlottetown’s population. What’s more, about 150 merchants in P.E.I. have joined the service and they give out about 1,500 gifts each Tuesday. They are all claimed in 10 minutes, and about 60 percent of them are picked up within the two-week period.

McCrae, a recent graduate of the Launch36 accelerator, has also launched the service in Saint John and Fredericton and has her sites set on a launch in larger cities in 2014.