TechCrunch
Zoho Goes For The Small Business Customer By Helping Them Organize And Share Their Contacts At A Price Of Their Choosing
Zoho has launched a service that centralizes contacts for customers, helps them share them across different groups and manage related tasks. As part of the effort to reach small business owners, the CRM company and business services provider is also letting customers set their own price after a 30-day free trial.
The service is designed for the small businesses that find a CRM systems overwhelming but still need a system to share business contacts, said Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna in an email interview. Most of them end up sharing contacts through spreadsheets. ContactManager is basically aimed to bridge this CRM-Spreadsheet gap where business users can use the app to share contacts with colleagues.
Vegesna compared the new service to the company’s contacts app for managing personal contacts that comes with Zoho Mail. Zoho ContactManager is the equivalent for small businesses. As the requirements grow and for mid and large-size businesses, customers can move up to Zoho CRM.
The service is pre-integrated with multiple data sources like CrunchBase and Facebook. It is also integrated with Google Apps and is available through Google Apps Marketplace. It has mobile support, including apps like Card Scanner and ContactManager.
And then there is the pricing. Zoho lets the user choose what they want to pay. That’s a pretty good deal for a small business owner or any company looking for a way to better collaborate on leads. Or is it? The sophistication of mobile CRM services, task management offerings and contact management services allows small business owners options that go beyond what a commodity priced service will offer.
But then again there is the full gamut of what Zoho provides as part of its network of 30 apps. The question, then, is less about price and more about the quality and the product’s fit with the customer.
CardSpring Connect Lets Merchants “Switch On” Card-Linked Offers On Foursquare & Elsewhere With Just A Click
Many brick-and-mortar merchants in the real world just want customers, but don’t have the time to learn the nuances of the various performance marketing tools and other programs at their disposal today. They just want new customers, or they just want to increase traffic during the slower parts of the day, for example. A new service called CardSpring Connect, launching today, now helps with that. The platform offers a self-serve online dashboard that allows merchants to easily create campaigns, connect apps like Foursquare, Trialpay, Thanx, MOGL, OnStripe and others, then sit back and watch as the analytics update in real-time with each swipe of a customer’s card at checkout.
CardSpring Connect is the latest from CardSpring, a payments infrastructure startup founded by former Netscape engineers as a means of connecting online and mobile applications to payment cards via APIs.
Foursquare had previously partnered with CardSpring and First Data earlier in 2013 to offer Visa and MasterCard cardholders discounts and other deals when they check in at particular venues. And in May, CardSpring partnered with VeriFone, integrating with the company’s PAYware Connect payments gateway to enable developers to build card-linked services for point-of-sale systems.
Until today, though, CardSpring was focused on letting developers build card-linked applications that trigger when a customer pays by credit or debit cards, but not on merchant-facing solutions. CardSpring Connect changes that.
Now, the company is targeting merchants via their financial partners and processors, offering them “set it and forget it” tools that let them build their own campaigns that they can then switch on or off with a click of button going forward. By default, CardSpring will handle the campaigns on its own, automatically distributing the promotion requests to all the supported services, but merchants can choose to get more granular and restrict which programs are used.
In an online dashboard, merchants can access their account, connect apps to their business (like Foursquare, Trialpay, Thanx, MOGL, Roximity, Moblico, OnStripe, etc.), and track transactions. Here, businesses can see whether customers are new or returning, transaction amounts, the estimated lifetime spend for those customers and the cost merchants paid to the related service to bring those customers in.
To give an example of how this may work: say a business wants to target Foursquare to bring in new customers. They could go into the campaign manager and click through a form to create an offer (e.g. a dollar amount or a percentage off, or whatever deal they may want to run), restrict it to Foursquare, and click to turn it on. As the customers come into the store and swipe their cards at checkout, the dashboard is updated with the transaction data. Though customer names and personal details are anonymized, the merchant now has a better understanding of how well that campaign actually performed. And they only pay for the actual purchases redeemed, which is what’s meant by “performance marketing.”
“One of the things we hear most from people who use Foursquare is how much they love using our app to find great deals,” said Steven Rosenblatt, Chief Revenue Officer at Foursquare about the integration. He says the company is looking forward to the launch of CardSpring Connect because it provides an easy way for merchants to create card-linked offers that helps Foursquare users save more money.
CardSpring Connect itself is an open and neutral platform, allowing retailers to essentially turn their point-of-sale terminals into their own local marketing solutions, says Walther, who refers to the platform as a “local commerce operating system.”
“For the first time you can really see from all these providers, if they sent you new customers,” explains CardSpring CEO Eckart Walther. “That was one of the challenges with Groupon – something like 40% of the people who bought a coupon were not new,” he adds.
“Our whole value proposition is that we go out and help these old, traditional folks turn on our system…There’s really nothing like it in the offline world,” he says, explaining that, offline, there hasn’t been an easy way to identify which customers were new, which service brought them in, and what they’re spending.
With CardSpring Connect, merchants can use the system with any point-of-sale system. The system is typically white labeled, so companies providing the merchant’s credit card services (e.g. First Data, VeriFone, or local processors, etc.) could switch it on for their business customers. On this front, CardSpring plans to have additional announcements in the near future.
Getting other to partner with the company will be a critical step in CardSpring’s growth, since its business is built on a licensing model where publishers pay to use the platform. Walther explains that it charges similarly to the way credit cards are charged today – a small fixed fee, and if there’s a redemption, there’s sometimes a small percentage of that redemption. Generally, the charges are around 10 to 30 cents, he says. “It’s a fluid business model,” he says.”We charge when we create value.”
Following today’s launch of CardSpring Connect, the company will be announcing more partnerships with other financial institutions, payment networks, and point-of-sale makers that will help CardSpring gets its platform in front of more merchants. Interested customers can learn more here on the company’s website.
Google Shopping Express Launches To All Of Bay Area, Debuts New Apps
After previously dogfooding and then beta testing its same-day Amazon Prime and eBay Now competitor Google Shopping Express, Google says that today the service is launching to all those in its initial target markets, San Francisco and the wider Bay Area, from San Francisco to San Jose. As TechCrunch previously reported, Google Shopping Express allows consumers to shop for everyday items from a range of national, regional and local stores, and then have products delivered to your doorstep the same day.
Currently, the service is working with retailers including American Eagle, Blue Bottle Coffee, Lucky, Office Depot, Palo Alto Toy & Sport, Photojojo, Raley’s Nob Hill Foods, Staples, Target, Toys“R”Us/Babies“R”Us, and Walgreens. And with today’s public debut, Google is also announcing the additions of new retailers DODOcase, Guitar Center, L’Occitane, REI, and Whole Foods Market.
Consumers can shop for items in the newly launched Google Shopping Express apps for Android and iOS, launching later today, where pricing is the same as it is in store. The apps let you use your retailer loyalty program, as well, in order to get the same savings you would otherwise receive. Google may also charge a delivery fee on top of the product pricing for non-members, and the service offers a subscription-based membership program. Interestingly, Google did not mention pricing for this membership today, pointing users to sign up for a six-month free trial instead. That speaks to the fact that the finalized pricing is likely still in flux. Even GSX’s Terms of Service don’t detail what prices may be, but we had heard earlier the goal is to be competitive with Amazon Prime.
Shoppers can use the service to select a delivery window, from morning to 9 p.m. Delivery drivers will then be routed efficiently based on customer orders, and will show up driving Google’s new hybrid fleet of vehicles branded “Google Shopping Express.”
The product is one of many now competing in the same-day delivery space, and challenges the likes of Amazon Prime, eBay Now, which just announced expansions in Europe, Postmates, and Instacart, which also just expanded beyond San Francisco to new market Chicago.
Interested customers can visit google.com/shopexpress to get started.
Here's What We Saw At ERA's Summer 2013 Demo Day
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) held its Summer 2013 demo day today — its fifth demo day in two years — with a customary ten companies taking the stage to show off the fruits of their labor. A relatively diverse class was on show today, and companies tackled markets ranging from college counseling and used industrial machinery to personal training and ad tech.
Take a peek at the full lineup below, and stay tuned for deeper dives with our favorite startups from this batch.
Machinio
Finding used industrial machinery is hard. It’s not something most of us think about on a daily basis, but when Machinio co-founder Dan Pinto was asked by a friend to help him find a particular printing press — and failed to do so — he realized how fractured the marketplace for such parts was. Machinio is like an Indeed.com for machinery, aggregating listings that would otherwise be spread across dealer sites, marketplaces, and classifieds.
Tapactive
Described as the “Netflix for personal training” by co-founders Robert Victor and Dan Oved, Tapactive helps people find personal trainers online and schedule sessions for a monthly fee of $495. That might sound like a lot, but if you’re training just ten times a month, you’re beating most trainer rates. Tapactive currently has over 300 personal training, yoga, Pilates, boxing and other fitness instructors signed up in New York.
Gigzolo
Gigzolo has created a platform for finding and booking artists, musicians, and photographers for events. Artists and potential clients can chat through Gigzolo — there is a plan to launch voice calling soon, too — and the platform has a Google Doc-like collaborative feature that allows both parties to edit the terms of the contract simultaneously. Reviews, videos, and pricing information allow for comparison shopping between artists, all of whom have been pre-screened.
Admitted.ly
Admitted.ly is a platform to help guide high school students through the college application process, beginning in their freshman year. Admitted.ly matches students to schools based on a personality profile, tells them which are reaches, likelies, or safeties, and gives them advice on how to improve their odds. In addition to students, there are also specific services for parents and guidance counselors. In the future, the team will be adding an application assistant feature, major and career mapping, financial aid planning, roommate matching, and test prep.
Piiku
Piiku is a B2B service for publishers that aims to solve the problem of losing some 90% of readers who are presented with a paywall. The plan is to convert those consumers by offering them video ad-supported access, which encourages returns, maximizes video ad revenue, and encourages paid subscribers over time. Piiku announced today that they have landed a contract with the publisher Gannett.
Agolo
Information travels fast, and it’s easy to miss something through traditional search methods. The goal of Agolo is to make social media data actionable in the real world, by applying a Natural Language Processing filter to multiple platforms to detect what is timely and important in a user’s social media feed. The initial product works with Twitter. Co-founders Sage Wohns and Mohamed Altantawy noted that while competitors mine real-time web data, no others are working in this specific area.
ClosetDash
According to ClosetDash co-founder Jennifer Lee, ClosetDash targets the 60% of a woman’s closet that is too good for donation but not high end enough to sell at a consignment shop. The startup brings clothing swap parties online and allows women to trade in their clothing for credit, which can then be applied to any of the items listed on the site. ClosetDash has seen a clothing intake of 10,000 pieces to date — a 358% increase in the last month — with a monthly unique visitor count of 16,000.
Metropolist
List fiends, listen up! Metropolist is creating collaborative best-of lists for any local topic imaginable. It is a market that is otherwise split into two camps, founder JC Goodrich said: Yelp and other user-generated services, and editorial sites like New York Mag and Thrillist. These recommendations are often irrelevant, dated, or incomplete, Goodrich said, a problem that Metropolist aims to solve through collaboration.
Rockerbox
This ad tech startup uses real time data to analyze user intent based on the sequences of their actions, rather than individual actions. The idea is to allow advertisers to run more efficient and targeted campaigns. Rockerbox co-founders Ron Jacobson and Patrick O’Toole both came to the venture from Appnexus. They are now processing over 1 billion ad impressions every day.
Nutmeg Education
Nutmeg Education tackles the U.S. educational system from within. The startup focuses on helping teachers better prepare their students for the Common Core, the educational standards mandated in 45 states that define what students are expected to learn in school. The startup helps educators create tests and quizzes and gives them personalized feedback on student progress.
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