Marketing

A steady stream of retail innovation exists online; some effective, some less so. But most claim to centre on a perennial problem in Retail:

How to drive sales through incentives without destroying long term brand value…

Group Buying and other Daily Deals sites were built to address this issue, and they’ve done a pretty decent job if their multi-billion dollar revenues are anything to go by! Though, to some extent they are a victim of their own success in that it’s hard for a brand to discriminate on price discretely when so many of its regular customers are Daily Deals customers.

Further challenges with Daily Deals include the fact that the Brand doesn’t typically control the creative, meaning they are often a Supplier to the Daily Deals Site not a Client. And, the Daily Deals site will leave a permanent record of the Sale in their back catalogue which will appear in Search and therefore undermine brand value. Further, the Brand owner is asked to give away quite a lot, more often than not the Retail price is discounted by more than 50% and a further 20% – 30% is given to the Daily Deals site as a commission.

Clearly there are a number of scenarios where this channel works well for a business. The unit sales volume can be significant with no marketing effort from the Brand Owner hence they are appealing in a lot of ways, especially if owning the customer is unimportant.

A radical new tilt at the problem is Entertainment Shopping, where the retail price is used only to describe the Size of the Prize, but is otherwise irrelevant. One example of Entertainment Shopping is Penny Auctions, where users purchase Bids which they use to win items, theoretically being able to win and items for a single bid, which may cost less than a dollar. The reality though is that these Auctions are super competitive and the likelihood is that you will lose many more auctions than you win, yet the bids you used on lost auctions still cost real money – in that sense it’s more akin to gambling than shopping. For the Auction site this means the overall yield per item is greater than the retail value, thus favouring the Penny Auctions themselves more than the Brand Owners or the customers, albeit customers may choose this purchasing route for the sheer joy of the Auction!

In the Entertainment Shopping category Australian Statup Wynbox has a much more evolved solution for Brand Owners. The genius of the Wynbox solution is that they provide their Buy-to-Win platform as an integrated shopping engine for an existing website, meaning the retailer retains end to end control of the user experience.

Buy-to-Win involves the retailer setting a ratio of free items to full paid items, meaning anything from 1 in 2 to 1 in 10 or more may be free, equivalent to a direct discount if that number are purchased by a single customer, or a lucky dip if you are buying just one.This is a simple way to provide a strong purchase incentive without discounting the product, and it can be fun too, so it ticks the box for the user who plays Candy Crush between shopping missions!

There are a number of interesting scenarios that underline the power of the Wynbox platform, such as in the sale of concert tickets for instance. As sales begin to lag for a concert, the ratio is introduced. The ratio can be cranked up to 1 in 2 if necessary to drive sales, but at no point is the ticket price discounted, meaning the customers who purchased the concert tickets at full price never feel cheated and the Talent and the Promoter are happy.

In fact, Wynbox works in a number of scenarios, including Fashion where margins on Full Price products are high but the vast majority of purchases normally occur at a substantial discount, with Buy-to-Win the discount can exist without an overt discount.

All retail businesses should be thinking about the entertainment value of their shopping experience as consumers explore less boring ways to shop for discretionary items. Wynbox offers a fresh solution that can be “plugged in” to an existing site, meaning a fast track to an Entertainment Shopping experience that would otherwise be very hard to achieve.