Tuesday April 6 8:35 PM ET
Online mall aims to reward shoppers
By Margaret Kane, ZDNet
MIAMI -- LookSmart Inc., a company that licenses its search engine
portal to content providers and others, is developing an online mall for
its partners that will let consumers earn incentive points when they
shop.
The mall will be available to all of LookSmart's customers, which
include more than 150 Internet service providers, who will be able to
market it under their brands.
The RewardMall.com site, which should launch within two weeks, will
feature up to 12 categories with up to six brands per category,
officials at the San Francisco-based firm said. The company has
partnered with CyberCash Inc.(Nasdaq: CYCH - news) to offer one-click
purchasing. It will partner with Netcentives Inc. for its rewards
program.
RewardMall customers will be able to earn frequent flyer points through
Netcentives, and use incentive points to purchase other merchandise and
special products offered by the RewardMall merchants.
The program combines two trends that have been growing in popularity on
the Internet lately -- incentive programs and portal based shopping
malls.
Netcentives is one of several companies that has tried to lure consumers
into online commerce by granting them points when they make purchases
with selected merchants online. The programs work similarly to offline
programs, allowing consumers to redeem their points for various
merchandise, and, in Netcentives' case, frequent flyer miles.
Online malls reborn
The online shopping malls springing up on the portal sites are a new
form of the malls that popped up several years ago.
Virtually every portal site now has a section devoted to e-commerce. A
new trend is to offer special features, ranging from a shared shopping
cart to one-click shopping to specialized searches, that span the
merchants featured within the shopping section.
Incentives are the latest of these features. Michael Baum, vice
president of e-commerce at the Go Network, a joint venture of Disney
Corp. (NYSE: DIS - news) and Infoseek Corp. (Nasdaq: SEEK - news) said
that features like gift certificates could also be a way to pull
shoppers online.
"Gift certificates bring people that haven't shopped online before into
the experience," he said. That is even more attractive if the
certificate can be spent in more than one place, such as a Go
certificate that could be spent at any of the site's participating
merchants.
As for incentive programs, Baum said his company sees the potential
being even greater given the offline positions his company has.
Go money
"We're working on a Go-wide incentive program where you could earn Go
currency and use it to buy merchandise online and offline," including
throughout the Disney corporation, Baum said. He would not give specific
dates for either the incentive plan or the gift certificate program.
While the incentive plan may be popular with consumers, they could run
into trouble with merchants, who have balked at letting a portal site
step in between them and their customers.
Indeed, new research from Jupiter Communications, released at the
Shopping Forum here, shows support slipping for high-priced, low-return
tenancy deals with portal sites.
Marc Johnson, director of digital commerce strategies at Jupiter, said
the company took future revenues driven from planned incentive programs
into account when it was forecasting the revenue figures released today.
"They should be doing that, they need to be doing that" he said. "If
they can extend it to the real world that makes it that much better." |
