Olson’s Observations

I met Ron and Ben of Offertrax a couple of months ago when I was back in Boston and they gave me a demo of their offering which was still in the very early stages. I was intrigued immediately and now that the product is officially in public beta I wanted to write a bit about it.

The Offertrax product allows merchants and customers to interact in a more meaningful way during a product search via feeds. With Offertrax merchants can offer a feed based tracking solution to customers and customers can use this medium, which is also naturally spam free, to track a number of different items and receive notice of price changes, etc. All of this is hosted by Offertrax so there is nothing for the merchant or customer to install (unless you choose to install their browser tool bar).

According to Ron and Ben, only 3% of site visitors convert to a sale so allowing the other 97% to stay in touch in an easy manner would theoretically drive some of them back to the site and convert. Here is the basic idea in graphical format:

Without Offertrax the vast majority of your site visitors won’t convert and they will be lost.

With Offertrax potential customers will be offered an easy and anonymous way to track the products they are interested in resulting in more conversions.

The beautiful thing about the Offertrax system is that it is beneficial customers as well as merchants. Customers will enjoy the Offertrax method of tracking because it is anonymous and will not result in more spam. Some key features include:

• The Offertrax price alert system which allows the customer to tell Offertrax when to update them on price changes or anything else like shipping cost.
• Special deals from merchants can be fed to customers since merchants can see that customers are tracking and offer them a lower price as an incentive to buy.
• Customers can share their “tracks” (what Offertrax calls a customer’s list of tracked items) and other Offertrax users can subscribe to them to aid their search (it is web 2.0 afterall so there needs to be a social aspect).

Here is how the interaction looks for the customers point of view:

Offertrax has some interesting stuff going on so I urge you to check them out. Why not cut down on your spam and the price of things you are looking to buy? It seems like a no brainer.