How Can Marketing Channels Increase Conversion Rates? Billeo's ZipThru Buy
Today we’re bringing you a little spin to our normal ecommerce vendor series. This one is a vendor for marketing channels like Pricegrabber, Nextag, and Shopping.com. It aims to increase their conversion rates by lowering friction in the buying cycle, letting customers complete the purchase on the marketing channel but the customer information and sales data would still pass through the merchant’s store, in effect increasing the conversion rates of the retailers who use that marketing channel.
Suzanne Usiskin is Billeo’s Senior Director of Products. She was nice enough to share some information on Billeo and their ZipThru Buy service with us – personally I think it sounds like a really interesting product with lots of potential to increase conversions.
Check it out and let me know what you think about it in the comments.
Andrew: Define Billeo in 140 characters or less:
Suzanne:
Short description of Billeo’s latest innovation:
Billeo’s express checkout service, ZipThru Buy, drives online and mobile purchases, increasing ROI for CSEs and merchants alike, while requiring no merchant integration.
Longer description of Billeo:
Billeo is a leader in optimizing how users shop and pay bills online. Since 2006, leading bank, card issuer, and product marketplace customers have come to rely on Billeo’s shopping and card bill pay services to engage, retain, and deepen the loyalty of their customers.
Preeminent financial institutions and card issuers like Discover, US Bank, Wells Fargo, and Visa and more than 40 banks, 20,000 billers, 1,500 merchants, six of the top 10 card issuers and three of the top five airlines are part of the trusted Billeo network that features the industry’s most advanced shopping and bill pay technologies. Due to its rapidly expanding customer base, Billeo was named one of the fastest growing private companies in 2012 by Inc. Magazine.
Billeo’s new ZipThru Buy service enables any comparison shopping site (CSE), product review site, or social networking site to drive instant and easy purchases directly from their website, tablet or mobile apps. The ZipThru Buy service closes the distance between product comparison and purchase, while keeping both the merchant and the CSE involved in the transaction.
The service increases the value of each user’s clicks by as much as 10X, by significantly decreasing shopping cart abandonment and thus converting clicks to purchases. ZipThru Buy is an express checkout solution that is fast, easy-to-deploy, and secure. It’s intuitive for the consumer, requires no merchant integration, and increases ROI for both the CSE and the merchant.
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ZipThru Buy Drives Purchases and Click Though ROI by:
- Streamlining the user buying experience on any device.
- Closing the “comparison to purchase” distance.
- Sustaining user engagement with the CSE throughout the shopping process
- Capturing transaction information for CSE analysis and optimization
- Enabling quick deployment for a variety of merchants.
Andrew: What is your target market? Please be as specific as possible.
Suzanne: The ZipThru Buy can be used by any site or app that features products from multiple merchants. Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs), product review sites, catalog apps, loyalty shopping malls and social networking sites can all use the service.
For example, CSEs display products from multiple merchants, and the consumer must “click through” to the merchant to complete a purchase. Then they must enter begin the tedious and repetitive process of entering all their information, made even more difficult on mobile devices. ZipThru Buy allows the CSEs to place “Buy Now” express checkout buttons on an app or website, enabling consumers to instantly purchase an item without going to the merchant site.
For merchants, ZipThru Buy will drive more purchases, especially from mobile sites, without any required implementation work on the side of the merchant. The merchant benefits from increased ROI and a new ability to enable an affiliate (or pay for performance) model.
ZipThru Buy does not require any merchant integration, but a merchant may choose to provide data to accelerate their availability via the service. If a merchant wishes to get enabled with ZipThru Buy as quickly as possible, they should contact Billeo.
ZipThru Buy Benefits:
For the CSE
- Transaction visibility and intelligence
- Increases user stickiness
- Facilitates sales, not fulfillment or service
- Increases merchant sales and ROI
- Fast merchant deployment
- Supports all devices
- Reduces fraud
- Highly scalable
- Ultra reliable
For the Merchant
- Increase purchases and ROI
- Reduced shopping cart abandonment
- No integration work to enable
- User relationship and information untouched
- Ability to create Affiliate/Pay for Performance model
- Supports all devices
- Reduces fraud and bad card errors
For the Shopper
- Simple and fast purchasing
- No typing of card and shipping information on mobile devices
- Single wallet across merchants
- No registration with multiple merchants
- Anywhere, any device purchasing
- Transparently retains merchant relationships for product fulfillment and support
Andrew: What’s your pricing structure look like? Do merchants have to make long-term commitments to use your products / services?
Suzanne:
For Merchants:
There is no integration and no fee to get set up. Merchants simply participate via the CSE.
For Marketplaces:
We charge a fee per ZipThru Buy completed. or per ZipThru click. Our incentives are aligned to drive transactions as easily and seamlessly as possible.
Andrew: What differentiates you from other companies that provide similar products / services?
Suzanne: There is no other service like ZipThru Buy on the market. With our product, CSEs can enable transactions and see the transaction details without any additional development or effort from the merchant. The merchant, in addition to more completed purchases, sees the transaction as they normally do, retaining all their transaction detail and user information as well. It’s a win-win for each participant.
Wallets such as PayPal and Google Wallet enable consumers to access their wallet at select merchants, enabling one click purchasing. However, these wallets have to be enabled at each and every merchant, and aren’t universally accepted. With ZipThru Buy, we integrate with a wallet at the CSE that can be used at all the merchants.
Marketplaces that enable purchases, such as Amazon, have their own wallets and a “walled garden” of products and merchants, requiring merchants to work with Amazon’s wallet and purchase process.
ZipThru Buy enables all CSEs to become like Amazon, with a CSE wallet and an express checkout that consumers love, but without having to work for 10 years to build up the merchant integration. ZipThru Buy also enables merchants to enable express checkout at multiple marketplaces and with multiple wallets, but without having to implement each and every one.
Andrew: What’s next for Billeo?
Suzanne: Enabling social buying with the ZipThru Buy button.
Andrew: Where can merchants learn more?
Suzanne: Contact Billeo at [email protected].
What do you guys think? Suzanne will be answering questions about Billeo’s ZipThru Buy in the comments if you have any.
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