Revolutionizing the Way People Shop and the Future of Business
Market America Acquires The Business of Shop.com
Again it is all about being BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER, EASIER which is actually making the business EASIER, FASTER, BETTER & BIGGER!
From the beginning, I set out to change the way people shop, and in the process, we've created a better marketing and distribution model that ultimately bridges the gap between cutting-edge technology, outstanding customer service, and One-to-One Marketing.
We've built a vast and solid network of independent entrepreneurs, which ensures we stay on the pulse of consumer demands and enables us to anticipate trends in the marketplace. But in order to culminate into what I have always known we would become, a bold move had to be made.
So with great anticipation of all that is to come, I'm excited to announce we have secured the most powerful partnership in Market America's history — one that will revolutionize the future of business. Shop.com is joining Market America to provide a technology platform that will position us as a leader in e-commerce. This literally speeds up everything we have been doing and planning to do by years. It puts us five years ahead of where we are right now. It is a shortcut to greater success and changing the way people shop. This is all about making it Easier to get there and grow Faster so that the business will be Better and Market America and your UnFranchise® income will be Bigger!
We believe that this partnership is so formidable that it will send shock waves throughout the shopping and Internet retailing world. Things will happen at lightning speed. When you combine our people power with our ability to capture and retain customers, and then apply One-to-One Marketing to match people to product and product to people to maximize sales with their technology, merchandising functionality (addictive shopping experience), and ability to drive traffic and attract customers — it is not only powerful, but competitively dangerous.
Sometimes two companies do not reach their full potential because they lack something or a key component to explode in the marketplace. It can be catalytic and explosively speed things up. It is synergistic where it multiples the power of each company's strengths many times. This allows us to do everything I have envisioned and described to you much more quickly and in a much bigger way — to change the way people shop and to impact economies on a national and international level through our collective buying power and an entrepreneurial opportunity that average people can win at.
What makes Shop.com so valuable in this relationship is the team behind the company and what our Market America team can do together with Shop.com going forward. Companies do not make people successful; people make companies successful. The infrastructure and supporting staff are keys to this deal and our future prosperity. The IT engineers at Shop.com are recognized pioneers of Internet shopping technology. They are recognized leaders and wrote the book on comparison shopping. They have done everything we were in the process of doing. Combine that with Market America's entrepreneurial people power, our ability to capture and retain customers, and our capacity to leverage sales with One-to-One Marketing and you have a diabolic new paradigm called Social Shopping! It already is turning heads in the Silicon Valley.
As we embrace the new partnership with a common strategy and vision, the synergies are competitively dangerous. Shop.com offers incredible functionality and impressive merchandizing. Plus, they have been one of the most successful comparative shopping sites out there — having mastered effective SEM and SEO practices that are ahead of their time. As a result, Shop.com has does nearly five times more traffic than we do. And now that will be captured by Market America and converted into customers and sales. Those sales and customers will be assigned and credited to UFOs as Shop Consultants.
Market America, on the other hand, is an Internet marketing and product brokerage company specializing in One-to-One Marketing. We're great at retaining customers — that is at the core of the One-to-One Marketing model, which has been our central focus and philosophy since the beginning. In its simplest form, we match people to product by helping them find the best deals on what they are shopping for. We also match product to people by recommending something that they might be interested in based on their profile and attributes.
Understanding the model helps you understand the potential of teaming up together with Shop.com. Fundamentally, they are champions at SEM and SEO, driving shoppers to their site to do comparison shopping and to get assistance in making shopping decisions. They get paid by merchants for clicking on the site. Then, the customer leaves the site and goes directly to the merchant to purchase the product. Shop.com does not capture or retain the customer. The customer would go directly to let's say a Target or a Walmart after that.
If I could use an analogy of fishing to illustrate how this works, it might be helpful. Market America would line its UFOs up on the back of a boat to throw their lines out with bait and bring fish (customers) in, one at a time. We would keep the fish and collect more and more, one at a time, and they would gradually add up as long as everyone keeps fishing. The more people who are fishing, the more fish we catch with the right kind of bait.
Shop.com, however, has a trawler and a huge net that brings millions of fish up on the deck. They count them and get paid, then throw them back in the water. In our partnership, we now bring the fish up in the net and keep them, pack them, and send them off to market — then throw the nets out again and bring in load after load of fish. Shop.com is not the merchant of record, doesn't take the order or process the credit card, doesn't sell the product, and doesn't retain the customer like we will do with them going forward. They basically get paid for other people fishing. So if you understand the models and what happens when you combine them, you have a magic combination to multiply volume, customers and sales.
Instead of spending time and effort on mass marketing, we devote our attention to how many things we can provide for each of our existing customers who we already have a relationship with. By making a point to know every customer on an individual basis, we are able to meet and exceed their needs.
This is all made possible by Market America's force of 180,000 UnFranchise Owners or Customer Mangers — now to be called "Shop Consultants" — who serve as personal shoppers or guides to each customer. This generates entrepreneurial zeal, passion, creativity and commitment within the program and marketing model.
Market America's continued success, stability, growth and profitability demonstrate the power and viability of our unique business system.
Combine Shop.com's ability to drive traffic and their remarkable customer shopping experience with Market America's Internet marketing infrastructure, people power, and 6 million loyal customers — it's nothing short of magical. It is a match made in heaven.
Simply taking the volume of traffic they can drive and allowing us to retain the customers through superior service makes this partnership into a money-making machine for every entrepreneur with Market America. Now we will grow at record speed. They bring the customer and we retain them by finding out what the customer wants. We match product to people, selling more to each customer. Add to that their merchandizing functionality, content, intuitive navigation and search — and you get an addictive shopping experience where every customer we bring buys more. Once this is integrated on our site, all of your customers buy more because they find more of what they want.
What makes this even more powerful is that we pay customers to shop, and pay them even more for inviting others to get paid to shop. Once we drive people to the site, it becomes addictive and is the biggest factor in our formula for success with customer retention. We are adding Paid to Shop and Cash Back to the Shop.com site as well! Do you see the magic combination?
Looking ahead, this alliance will have a profound impact on the future of our business and the direction of our industry. In the entrepreneurial spirit of determination, let's carry forward the dream of revolutionizing the way people shop. Market America is simply making things bigger, better, faster, and easier to change the way people shop and change the economic paradigm where anyone can become financially independent by creating our own economy. Remember the phrase, SOCIAL SHOPPING, because that is what we are giving birth to with our people power, One-to-One Marketing and social networking.
Benefits of integrating Shop.com's team, technology and platform with Market America's team:
- Shop.com is recognized for the best comparison shopping technology which will now power marketamerica.com
- Shop.com currently generates nearly 5 times more unique visitors than Market America which we will convert and assign to 'Shop Consultants' (UFO Customer Managers)
- Will have the ability to capture and retain millions of new customers from first time purchases and assign the new customers to 'Shop Consultants' (UFO Customer Managers)
- Will attract a constant flow of new customers from their SEO and SEM efforts
Award-winning merchandising functionality and display, making shopping appealing and easy which increases conversions
- Will have the ability to have ma® branded products on the Shop.com site as a channel to attract new customers
- Will have even faster search and better navigation for shopping — making it simple and intuitive
- Will add millions of additional products to our EZ Cart
- Shop.com has over 40 million products/SKUs
- Will save us 2 to 5 years of IT development
- Provides the technology to allow for real time (or close to real time) IBV
- Will speed up our site
- Will generate more advertising revenue
- Ability to market and sell our products in the United Kingdom, setting the stage for Market America to launch the UnFranchise Business within a year
- Allow Market America to channel our products to other shopping sites (i.e., Google Base and Bing) to sell and retain new customers, which will be assigned to 'Shop Consultants'
- Shop.com has one of the best data feed platforms, allowing any merchant or vendor to put their products on their platform fast and easy with quick updates
- The data feed and tracking management platform allows us to do more for partners and merchants, which provides more incentives to be a direct partner in our EZ Cart, resulting in higher cash back, higher IBV and advertising revenue moving Market America closer to being a true Universal Shopping Cart
- Shop.com is recognized as pioneers and experts for Internet shopping technology
- Shop.com technology allows us to eliminate merchant aggregators and data feed channelers resulting in increased IBV, higher cash back and faster speed.
If you are more technically equipped and want more drill down on the power behind this partnership, here are further details about Shop.com's technology, components and platform:
OneCart® — The industry's best multi-merchant, multi-language, multi-currency shopping platform. Recognized in industry publications as the pioneer and leader in comparison shopping and online merchandizing.
- Products: Supporting virtually any type of product a merchant might offer. Supports 176 unique data fields that allow products from all categories — including unlimited personalization options, product attributes and special instructions. Currently, Shop.com has 40 million fully attributed products with rich descriptions, sale prices, and multiple images.
- Seller Business Rules: Shop.com supports hundreds of seller level configurations that give merchants the ability to map their business rules into the OneCart system. These include the industry's most robust shipping calculation options, tax settings, shipping cut-off date/times, coupons, special offers, shipping destination rules, and much more.
- OneCart Checkout: Allows shoppers to add items and checkout from multiple merchants. Shoppers can ship items to different destinations, use different shipping methods, apply merchant coupons, and even split payment methods across merchants.
- Account Structure: The only Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) that offers shoppers an account to maintain all their OneCart purchase history, product and store reviews, price alerts, address books, wish lists and more.
- Localizable: Shop.com sites are fully localizable. Currently, they have full integration into the UK, but previously the company operated sites in 7 languages.
Traffic — Shop.com is a leader in search engine traffic acquisition.
- SEM: State-of-the-art (patent pending) SEM system that manages bids on 50 million keywords across search engines.
- SEO: Shop.com's SEO traffic has doubled year over year. The growth has been achieved by focusing on building a high-quality site, with lots of unique content, easy navigation, fast page load, great products and a distributed network of bloggers and editors. The addition of unique content has naturally increased inbound links as more people find the content useful and integrate it into their sites.
Search — The third-generation product search engine is not only super fast, but uses consumer response to weight the search results in order to provide the absolute best results. The search engine indexes all our product data and uses proprietary algorithms to weigh hundreds of product data points to rank and score the results of any search. The engine then uses the user action of the result set to boost or de-boost specific products. Products and stores with lots of interaction get boosted and those with less engagement don't.
Within the search results, shoppers can refine or narrow their search by selecting a department, product type or attribute, brand, seller or other related navigation elements. Shoppers can also change the default view and results, narrow by price range, or change the sort order or any result set.
Unique Content — Shop.com has thousands of unique editorial pages.
- Buying Guides: They have created hundreds of information and entertaining guides to help consumers make buying decisions across dozens of product categories. Example: Shop.com/how+to+buy+perfume-e.xhtml
- Content Guides: Rich navigation pages that guide shoppers to the right products and brands. Example: Shop.com/Beauty-Perfume+~+Cologne-Perfume+~+Cologne+Type-Perfumes-34
- Brand Pages: Shop.com built 5,000 brand pages (from their 60,000 brands) that detail and showcase the top retail brands. The brand pages are interlinked across the site to make it easy for shoppers to find all the info they need for a specific brand. Thousands more of these brand pages will continue to be built. Example: Shop.com/brands/7+For+All+Mankind
- Trends Pages: The most exciting and entertaining content ever developed. Shop.com's editors are able to build collections of products across multiple departments around a unique shopping thread. In January, anyone will have the ability to create a Trend. They also have a Trend search option which narrows search results into just the highest-quality stores. Example: Shop.com/trends/vintage+kitchen
eGifts — Shop.com provides shoppers a way to allow gift recipients to select the gift they want to receive. With eGifts, shoppers (the gift giver) selects a list of products they think the recipient might enjoy. eGifts then sends this list of products to the recipient, who chooses the product that best fits their needs. The recipient also provides their shipping address. The gift giver's credit card is billed and the selected item is shipped directly to the recipient. Gift givers can also send an eGift to multiple recipients. Overall, eGifts is a great way to give a gift that a recipient will truly enjoy. This will be available for you in January!
PriceAlerts — Shoppers can set up a price alert on any of their 40 million products. Shoppers set a price in which they would be interested in purchasing a specific product. When the product price hits that point, an e-mail notification is automatically sent to the shopper.
Wish Lists — Shoppers can create Wish Lists and add any of their 40 million products to their list. There are no limits on the number of lists a shopper can create and lists can be shared via e-mail or any social network.
ShopCompanion.com — Shop.com has a database of 25,000 stores. Shoppers search for products and ShopCompanion returns the stores that sell those products. When a shopper provides their location, Shop.com will show them the stores or outlets closet to them that sell these products. Shoppers can also request paper catalogs from those stores that offer them.
Merchant Business Center (MBC) — Shop.com has developed an integrated suite of web tools that are designed to make it as easy as possible for a merchant to integrate into the Shop.com network. The tools allow merchants to upload and manage their Shop.com stores and products, retrieve and manage orders, as well as download detailed activity reports.
- Content Management — Merchants can provide Shop.com product and inventory data feeds. These can be fully automated and delivered to Shop.com as often as necessary. In addition, Shop.com's self-serve tools allow smaller merchants to manually upload products and store data as needed. The self-serve tools allow any and all merchants complete online control over all their products, stored data and business rules (e.g., tax, shipping, and dozens of other settings).
- Order Processing Tools — Shop.com's tools allow merchants to view, download and provide a customer's status for all orders placed on the Shop.com network. Merchants who have a more formal IT infrastructure can elect to receive their orders automatically. Shop.com supports a number of formats and communication protocols for automated order integration (i.e., PGP e-mail, HTTPS, FTP).
- Reporting — Shop.com 's Merchant Reports give merchants an up-to-date view of their success on the Shop.com network. Merchants can view the number of orders, orders by category, by shopper, etc.
A Perfect Match
We have what they don't — customer retention, people power, One-to-One Marketing, a profitable model from the sales of products — and they have higher traffic, SEO and SEM, speed, website merchandising, comparison shopping, Silicon Valley resources, and presence in the online shopping industry for 13 years.
Further details about the acquisition of Shop.com's business and how it will greatly impact the growth of your UnFranchise business will be outlined in the January issue of Powerline magazine and communicated through newslines, Leaderline, News & Announcements, the ma Blog, Twitter and Facebook. To read the full press release, click here.
Additionally, be sure to secure your tickets to the ma World Conference (being held February 3-5, 2011 in Miami, FL) as you will gain all of the insight about the acquisition and also learn from the executives of Shop.com.
What to Expect Next and the Integration
- The integration of both websites will begin immediately and work together under one umbrella as all customers will be assigned to Shop Consultants, which are UFO Customer Managers. You will be trained on this and how to handle customers from both Market America and Shop.com.
- There will be a major press and media campaign positioning the partnership's power and potentials while blowing up Paid to Shop!
- Integration will take place over the next several months with releases and additions going live every couple weeks.
- You will see the first effects of it in January with a major exciting release and campaign which will produce sales for you immediately.
- A full demonstration and rollout plan will be presented at World Conference so plan to be there and make arrangements to get all of your key people there. This alone is reason enough to make sure you have everyone coming.
- We will provide you a full integration and project release plan with approximate dates.
- Within months we will be converting and assigning millions of customers so make sure you have met the IBV requirements to be in the lead rotation.
- The objective is to put Market America products up on their site as quickly as possible and it will generate BV sales and customers as well.
- The objective is to continue to add millions more products to marketamerica.com within months.
- The plan is to move as many vendors or merchants over to the EZ Cart (to be called the OneCart) as quickly as possible and to give customers or visitors access to all the merchants, brands and stores.
- We will provide you updates every two weeks.
- In very short order (dates to be announced) we will use their intuitive navigation and search on marketamerica.com.
- Within six months, the marketamerica.com site will be powered by their technology and site for merchandizing. Go to Shop.com to see how it works and you will be impressed!
- We will be marketing Market America products on the Shop.com site in UK within months and reserving the customers for the pioneer UFO team selected to launch the UnFranchise Business Opportunity (UBO) there in 2011. You will be able to sell products to customers or prospects in the UK and get commission credit in your home country (USA or Canada) until we officially open there with the UBO and MPCP.
I believe in you. Keep growing.
JR Ridinger
