DiscountIF
DiscountIF is a different take on social e-commerce, offering consumers cashback on every day items, based on the outcome of a sporting event. We call it “The Power of IF”. It is the only site dedicated to this kind of shopping experience. A classic example is: “Buy this Samsung 47” TV and get 100% cashback IF Chelsea win the Champions League”.
Backed and staffed by a number of ex-Betfair colleagues, DiscountIF was launched in the summer of 2014 with a low-risk strategy of “minimal investment to test and learn”. We are now ready to take the product to the next level with a fresh band of investment capital.
By twinning shopping for household favourites from Apple, Samsung or LG with high-profile sporting events, DiscountIF has created a zero-risk but exciting proposition for customers who enjoy the idea of winning cash, but don’t want the downside risk or associated stigma of placing a bet. This concept has been used successfully by brands before – such as by Toshiba who in 2010 sold an additional 10,000 televisions with a “cashback if England win the FIFA World Cup” promotion.
Our idea has been to take this attractive and emotive promise and build a technology and risk management platform to enable any retailer to offer promotions of this sort. Our starting point has been to prove the model with our own brand but we have significant plans to open up the platform to any e-commerce company who manages its own stock and shipping.
We’ve been recognised in and chosen as finalists for several innovation awards. We were recently Semi Finalists in the Start-Up category of PitchtoRich. Over 1,000 start-ups applied and we were in the Top 10 companies.
We’ve reached over 6 million people on twitter and we’ve acquired a small user base of very engaged customers. 37% of customers have bought more than one offer on our site. We’ve also had some early beta tests of allowing customers to create their own offers with significant conversion rates of over 30%.
Our technology has been driven by our CTO who has managed an external resource team in eastern Europe. This gives us flexibility and scalability as well as a good range of skills on which we can call.
This finance round will enable us to substantially scale our development in the near term, in particular focusing on building the “full-fat” version of DiscountIF, which has been identified in our beta phase. We have identified roles which will allow us to scale the technology in line with our growth expectations.
Feedback has been positive and we have achieved our goal of creating a “no-brainer” proposition for consumers. Our primary challenge has been converting visitors into customers who find precisely the right match of “product I want” with “event I care about”. The next version of DiscountIF therefore will allow users to specifically identify a promotion to sit next to the product they have come to purchase.