Over the last year I’ve been working with my team to develop a new eCommerce, marketing and transactional platform called BuyReply.
We’ve been deliberately vague and haven’t given much away about the concept however today I get to spill the beans… exciting times.
BuyReply is an idea I had last year which was born from the frustration of being an online retailer and realising that people spend most of their time in the real-world rather than in front of their computers. Whilst eCommerce is great, the reality is that only a fraction of consumers buy via eCommerce.
In reality our smartphone enabled population is spending less time in front of their computers as their mobile devices are now more powerful and capable than ever before. Traditional eCommerce only represents a fraction of overall commerce, around 6% in the US and 4-5% in Australia.
This realisation has led me to believe that one of the largest opportunities which exists in business today is the opportunity to bridge the online and offline worlds of commerce by unlocking revenue from exiting and engaged audiences in the offline world. This is the trend that Groupon rode and they became the fastest growing business in history. This means using eCommerce technologies ‘outside of the browser’ by selling to large and engaged smartphone enabled audiences such as TV audiences, magazine subscribers, newspaper subscribers, radio listeners, live audiences and more.
The platform we are announcing today is designed to to exactly this. We’ve created a new paradigm of eCommerce, one that is totally different to the traditional browser based “Amazon.com” model.
We’ve built an innovative and novel transactional platform that enables anyone to buy a product from any medium without requiring an app. All you need to do to buy is send a one word email or tweet and that starts a transaction. If you have a BuyReply wallet your payment becomes a one-click payment via text message. You can see some examples here. Advertisers can add a transaction point to any advertisement by simply displaying a call-to-action on a printed page, television screen, billboard, scoreboard or even sky writing!
Yes… you could sell from the sky with BuyReply… as long as you can afford the jet fuel!
BuyReply is easy to use and simple to understand but the ways in which it can be used in commerce are practically unlimited – and the ability to buy and sell using Twitter adds an awesome social dynamic to your advertising campaigns. You can learn how it works here.
I’d like to thank the readers of this blog and those who have been interested enough to keep in touch as the journey of BuyReply has unfolded. What you see today is the tip of the iceberg. We have an incredible amount of product roadmap to build and we are hard at work on this already. This is day zero of an incredibly exciting journey that we believe has the potential to disrupt the way that media is consumed on a global basis.
Our platform can span currencies and countries and we can’t wait to see how you use it.
We already have some amazing global brands signed up. Last week BuyReply was used by Sportsgirl and Oroton at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Sydney to sell the latest looks directly off the runway. We will be announcing some more innovative use cases over the upcoming days and weeks that will show you some of the great ways that this flexible yet powerful platform can be used.
Please read our BuyReply welcome blog to learn more!
Cheers,
Brad
P.S. We are launching on an invitation only basis so sign up here.