This past Sunday evening, my new partners – Richard Wing and Mike Myers – and I, launched a new Marketplace to
- create an advertising space for merchants using the Rapid Action Profits (RAP) system to sell their products,
- create an affiliate network with a centralized repository of instant commission products that they can sell, and
- create a free membership for buyers of those products to assist both merchants and affiliates in the cross-selling/backend marketing of other products
Of course, there are other “marketplaces” out there, but we couldn’t find a single one that even attempted to serve in the best interest of merchants, affiliates, and customers.
Maybe that’s because they aren’t really marketplaces.
What we found is that they rarely even had a customer focus. Because their real agenda was to bring together merchants and affiliates, they had no customer component, at all. It seems to me that a marketplace should be customer-focused, and make the customer experience as positive an experience as possible.
Instead, most of the other services we found weren’t marketplaces, at all. They were only interested in “hooking up” affiliates with merchants, for the sake of an individual sale, and did nothing with regard to the customer but send them to the payment processor, and then collect the payment info after the sale.
In short, they were affiliate networks – not a Marketplace, at all.
Is there a reason they’ve totally left the customer out of the equation? Sure. The customer is the merchant’s customer, and brings nothing to their bottom line. Their service involved the customer – only as far as it had to.
At iDavi, we feel that we can help both merchants and affiliates much more, simply by shifting focus slightly, and trying to retain the customers attention with targeted cross-selling, and backend marketing (marketing tasks where many marketers fall short). The extra effort that we put into marketing on behalf of the affiliate, as well as the merchant, should result in higher sales and a better bottom line for all concerned.
