Harish Mallipeddi

Interesting read on NextJump’s business model. Amidst an endless list of me-too comparison shopping sites, this one has a completely different approach. Because of the way their business works, they got their hands on 3 valuable data sources:

• consumer demographic database - they’re considered a non-traditional benefits provider and hence they get access to the employment status of 30 million workers (who also happen to be consumers). It gets part of the employee record and sometimes even job title or salary grade.
• transactional data - from merchants, credit card companies
• consumer preference data - because it is seen as an employee perk, HR departments inside companies and the individuals themselves are willing to engage in a level of preference data sharing that has not been seen in e-commerce before. The customer preference data allows for better targeting and ultimately superior conversions (around 10-11% vs 2% for the best commerce sites today)